Welcome to the huberman lab, guest Series, where I and an expert, guest discuss science and science based tools for everyday life.
I'm Andrew huberman and I'm a professor of neurobiology and Ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine. Today's episode is the fifth in a six-episode series on fitness exercise and performance. And today's episode is all about recovery. That is how to maximize your recovery to achieve your fitness and exercise and performance goals and how to avoid overtraining dr. Andy Galpin. Great to be back.
Today we're discussing recovery and I'm very excited to have this discussion because as we know, despite the fact that different types of exercise can be used to trigger different types of adaptation, such as increased long-distance endurance and aerobic capacity strength, hypertrophy Etc. The workouts themselves are not actually when the progress occurs, when the adaptation occurs, and this to me is
Really interesting because it parallels, what we see with. So called neuroplasticity, which is the nervous. Systems ability to change in response to experience. We sit down to learn something, we experience something and that is the trigger for rewiring of the nervous system, but the actual rewiring occurs away from the experience or the learning. So to in Fitness and in exercise, recovery is where the Real Results actually.
Judge where we get better. So I'd love for you to explain what recovery really is and the different types of recovery. Certainly different ways to enhance recovery. And I'd also love for you to explain whether or not there are ways that people can become better at recovering. Because if indeed recovery is when progress emerges when we get better, well then, anything that supports our recovery and gets us better at recovering ought to increase our rate and our degree of progress.
Absolutely. You nailed it in the
Caption what people really want is some sort of change whether you were talking athletes or general population, this change is some sort of improvement in muscle function, reduction of body, fat higher functioning metabolism, whatever the case is. And the only way that happens is we talked about the equation of stress causes adaptation but as you alluded to the piece in the middle is only if you can recover from it. And so the game we're playing here is we all agree. We want more out of station. That means
We need to bring more stress in this system. We then have to ensure that our recovery, outpaces the stress input or else, we will know adaptation will current affect what happens is you will actually be a negative spot and start going backwards. And so what I would love to do is talk about how we've handled this. And I've had a decent amount of experience here. I was fortunate enough to do my master's degree in the laboratory of a gentleman named Andy fry, who's an NSC, a Lifetime Achievement Award winner. And he
In large part, recovery overtraining, overuse overload, and a lot of areas. In addition, I've been fortunate enough to work with individuals from high-functioning CEOs and Executives who have little time for Recovery, High job stress to into athletes and they think of the example of pitchers in Major League Baseball who have to recover in a matter of four days that they can pitch again at maximum velocity. So I would love to outline some of the tools and tactics.
Geez that we use for all these individuals, give you some foundational stuff. And I would love to maybe actually cover some things that most people have never heard of some stuff. You may not have access to some technologies that we use some biomarkers and then even a whole bunch of things that are keeping with the theme of your show here cost-free or extremely low cost. So all those strategies but I'd also like to do is cover nutrition. Supplementation and fueling and hydration and
But that's probably going to have to be saved for an additional conversation that will do in the next episode. Yes.
So we will absolutely hold a conversation about nutrition and supplementation where you can educate us about all the top Contour stuff all the way down to the fine details.
I do have a question about recovery and it's one that I think most people are familiar with themselves which is soreness we think of it as muscle soreness but I was trained early on in my scientific career to always question the seemingly obvious. So a couple of questions about soreness. First of all, what does soreness really reflect? Is it really muscle soreness. It feels like it's in the muscles but what other
organ systems and tissues and cell types. Does it involve and then, I'm particularly interested in this concept or this experience that many of us including myself had, which, is delayed onset muscle soreness. Why would it be that when we are less in shape, or when we perform a movement, that is extremely novel to us, the soreness seems to arrive after a reasonable delay of maybe even a day, you know where find the next day. But then 48 hours later, we are exceedingly sorrowful.
And as we get more fit or more familiar with the movement, the soreness seems to arrive earlier. So I realized I just asked you about three questions or more, first of all, what is muscle soreness at a cellular level which cells? Which organ systems and so forth. What does it mean? If we are sore, is something. I know we'll get into a little bit later and then why the delayed onset muscle soreness?
It's actually one question so it's totally fine. You answered all of you has to all three because I'm going to actually answer number three, which will answer number two, which will
actually answer number one.
I'd love to tell you that. I set it up that way intentionally, but I'm just happy to hear that where I was unable to be concise. You are able to be concise. Thank
ya. We are still learning a lot about this area. It's actually really difficult to perform these studies. Anytime you ask a question about something like pain or soreness, your immediately talking about perception. And there is obviously a physical component to that and there's also perception. And so teasing those things out is extraordinarily challenging.
Said there has been a lot of work in this area and in fact, probably I'm, you may have a show already out on pain or maybe what's coming down the
road, we did an episode on pain a while ago, but it's definitely time to revisit that literature. I also have some amazing colleagues at Stanford who work on pain. Both from the cellular and molecular side. But also from the psychological side about how our understanding of pain and what we believe about paying shapes, the experience of pain and Pain
Relief. Amazing. That's
Is that stuff is incredibly important? And I'm glad we flagged that and maybe we'll just call that good for now. They could come back later for another, one of your shows. So that being said, why does it happen 28 to 48 hours after you exercise? Well, that actually should give you some Clues into what's happening. So the traditional dogma of delayed onset. Muscle soreness is what this is called is that it is a result of quote-unquote micro tears in the muscle. And so, you can sort of think I challenge the muscle. There were some small tears in
And I'm feeling the results of that. Well, in fact, that certainly does happen and it can happen. That is not what's explaining your muscle soreness. And in fact, you can be quite sore from exercise and have no measurable amount of muscle damage and so much like anything else who are in this idea of pain, it's not a one-to-one explanation, there are multiple factors that are probably causing your perception of pain muscle damage.
Can be one of them. It is not the only one and it is probably in my opinion, though, this is yet to be shown definitively.
Probably not even the leading cause of it and so what's actually happening? Well the reason is taking you 24 to 48 hours. Is you can actually find various papers literature reviews, dating back a number of years. Now the over a decade that show these wonderful curves of an inflammatory and immune response and we don't need to necessarily go through the entire physiology right now. But effectively, what's happening? Is those things have a little bit of a time delay and so some of those steps happen immediately like right when the exercises there in the some of them
Laid six to 24 to 48 hours. If you know a little bit about this physiology it's you have a combination of neutrophils and macrophages and a bunch of things happening and this says a Time sequence. So what happens is, by the time we get to this 28 to 48 hour window. Now the muscle soreness kicks in
which wait a minute, if I if this was a result of my muscles being torn and that happened immediately
Wouldn't that pain start immediately? Well, the answer is what. And so that that is your first clue that that's not responsible for when we look at that, immune response and we see that that is actually Peak 24 to 48 hours later, and then that's the same time, the pain kicked in that's cooling unit. The problem. So we have this immune response happening and inflammation then all of a sudden we start getting fluid accumulation. And now there are what are called nociceptors and you're probably very, obviously you're very familiar with these in these, your pain receptors. What's actually interesting is we don't necessarily know
A lot of information about how many pain receptors are in muscle, they're not really in the belly. In fact, this is why I can perform my muscle biopsies, and they don't
really hurt you mean in the belly of the
muscle, correct? Yeah, we do have pressure sensors, though. And so, if you change the volume of the tissue, you will respond to that very, very quickly. So, by enhancing swelling, in the actual muscle, that is immediately putting pressure on those pressure receptors, if you will, that's the signal. So what's probably happening here? And I just I just hate to
View another bone but a lot of delayed onset muscle soreness is probably just a neural feedback loop rather than his actual muscle damage.
Makes a lot of sense. There's a lot of interactions between the types of neurons that control touch sensation and pain sensation and itch sensation. In fact a lot of people kind of collapse, it champagne together. Bingo you know that something is painful and it itches is a familiar thing for people mosquito bites and such
And of course, there's the classic gate theory of pain. Yeah, which people will be familiar with and then I'll explain why I'm explaining this, which is if you something hurts, you know, you Bonk your knee or you stub, your toe. We tend to grab that body part and trying to rub it totally and that rubbing is not a coincidental thing. It activates a set of touch sensors that are that respond to kind of broad doll touch and
That actively inhibits through the release of inhibitory. Neurotransmitter, the fibers that control the pain signal. So anytime we rub it, you know, like a charlie horse, our leg or we we stub our toe and we, you know, we wince and then we grab the tone we got in like squeezing a little bit that's actually deactivating or partially in activating the pain mechanism. So the idea of that swelling response. Would then trigger a neural response that the then would recruit
Route the pain receptor response here. I'm using broad broad brush Strokes here to explain. This makes very good sense, to me now, and only now that you've explained how this process
works. I can actually even add more to that. So if you remember how muscles work, so, we have to have some sort of signal from the nervous system that has to actually go in and tell the muscle to contract. Will remember there are a few episodes ago. We covered the physiology here of what's called a motor unit.
Okay. Well, what I did explain to our called muscle spindles and we have talked about proprioception in an episode of before as well but we never tied this picture together so let me walk you through that really quickly and it's going to tie this Loop in a nice bow. So what happens is this motor unit is is coming in from what's called an alpha motor unit. And that's going to be integrating your muscle fibers and that's going to tell the muscle fibers to contract. Those are typically spread out throughout the all sides of the
In interior exterior. All over on the outside though, there is another type of muscle called a muscle spindle. Now these are non contractile so they don't have that actin and myosin and they don't produce Force. They are responsive, they are proprioceptive. So what that means is they sense stretch on. This is why for example if you were to stretch a hamstring stretch any muscle group, it doesn't really matter or muscle its innate response is to fire back to close that distance and this is what keeps you from say if you're leaning to the right
You can imagine that the example we give us if you're standing on one foot and you start swaying to the right. All right, let's say you're standing on your right foot and this makes it easier for folks you start swing to the right. Like you're going to fall on your right ear. Will hit the ground. The inside of your right calf muscle, will start being stretched. The outside will start being compressed, right? So the stretch on the inside of the right, calf muscle will sense that stretch and it will respond by Contracting that pulls you back the
And stops you from falling. That's proprioception and muscle spindles and stretch and tell you to contract the way that they work is through gamma motor neurons. And so, these are sensory things. So, what's happening is unlike when you tell your muscles are, contracted goes Alpha to the muscle contract, these muscle, spindles Works us that it is oh, I've been stretched, send signal back to some Central Point, typically in the spinal cord. And we don't actually want to go all the way up to the brain. We've got a time delay. This is why these are subconscious
autonomic writer versus somatic. So that gamma is going to go back to the central location and then come back through the Alpha motor neurons until it took and tracked. So you have those wonderful mechanism of sensing stretch, going back. Well, one Theory that's been put forward regarding muscle damage. Is that the pressure is actually being applied to those nerve endings of the muscle spindles, and that's actually responsible for the pain signal. That's going back and coming up to you.
You're registering that as pain rather than it is actually in the, the contractile units. So the muscle
fibers, that's a very intriguing idea because it would suggest that stretching muscles in order to alleviate soreness might be the exact incorrect thing to do. Yeah. Now, I'm not saying that for sure, for certain, I'm just building off the mechanistic logic that we've laid out here. Yeah. Really that you've laid
out here. There is a, the more effective principal Bass
on exactly that which is this is we don't generally why low-level movement is effective at reducing acute soreness
because that's low-level contraction of the muscles and you're going to
stretch and get tissue out and you can get fluid out.
Wow. You literally pumping it out of the
cell. Yes. And in our previous episode, we were talking about programming or keep using the Wii. But let's be fair here. Where you were educating us, including me, and the audience about different structures for programming. Exercise for specific adaptations, Etc them month, week year, skip scales, Etc. We had a brief discussion about the fact that if one trains legs very hard with,
Distance training, some heavy squatting or deadlifting it or and there's some soreness that oftentimes doing some quota, quit lighter cardio, or some low impact, work the next day, or any number of different things that involve not high-intensity contractions of the muscles, but that do require contractions of the muscles that it can alleviate soreness more quickly than if one were to Simply lie around and you know, watching Netflix or
something. Yeah, that's exactly right. The
To go back just a little bit as well. The, if that's really the case, the question is like, where is this inflammatory signal coming from? And while there's much to be learned there, there is a little bit of information right now that suggests it's potentially coming from free, radicals released from the mitochondria again, that may or may not hold up as more research comes. I'm not sure. But if you remember back to our conversation on endurance. So we talked about the electron transport chain and
Look metabolism, and regardless of whether or not you're getting energy from glycolysis or carbohydrates, remember, they have to be finished through aerobic metabolism. So even if you're lifting weights and you're using carbs for your fuel, you have got to finish that metabolism by running it into the mitochondria and Performing oxidative metabolism as a result of that, that electron transport chain runs. So, theoretically, if free radicals, which is, which are hyper reactive, oxygen species, basically their oxygen molecules that are missing.
An electron so that they react to a lot of things. They're the opposite of antioxidants. By the way, this is the oxygen molecules with extra protons so they can balance the charge. If those leaked out that in and of itself is going to be a massive inflammatory signal. And that's probably what signals the cause of these neutrophils and macrophages and kicks off this entire Cascade. Again, I believe we need more research there. I need to look into it. Maybe it's more definitive than I that I know. But that's probably what's happening. Potentially, what's happening, rather?
That causes that Cascade in Signal. Also, what you have is this combination of? Well, if that's the case, why am I not getting tremendous amount of muscle damage when I do more aerobic based exercise? Well, because you don't have the mechanical tension pulling on the fibers that's actually causing damage to the cell wall that allows these free radicals to escape the mitochondria and the cell wall. So that's the best we can postulate at this moment. As to why those things are happening. And then why
Again, low level exercise tends to enhance even things like percussion. So using either instruments that put a low level of vibration in your leg or like nomadic boot. So you massage all these things are generally probably helping because they're moving that stuff out a demon most specifically. So, pressure comes off of those nerve endings in the muscle spindles and allows you to stop receiving that signal of pain. Despite the fact that you didn't actually regenerate tissue,
At all yet.
Fascinating and I think that beautifully frames where we're headed next which is to talk about all the different modes of recovery and how to accelerate them and perhaps even how to combine different forms of recovery in order to become better at recovering and in doing. So make faster progress with Fitness before we begin, I'd like to emphasize that this podcast is separate from my teaching and research roles at Stanford, it is also separate for dr. Andy galvan's teaching, and
Rolls at Cal State Fullerton. It is however, part of our desire and effort to bring zero cost to Consumer information about science and science related tools to the general public in keeping with that theme. We'd like to thank the sponsors of today's podcast. Our first sponsor is momentous momentous makes supplements of the absolute highest quality. The huberman Lab podcast is proud to be partnering with Momentis for several important reasons. First of all, as I mentioned their supplements are of extremely high quality, second of all their supplements are generally in single ingredient for
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Out, eight sleep. Currently ships in the USA, Canada, United Kingdom select countries in the EU and Australia. Again, that's eight, sleep.com huberman to save $150 at checkout. So to kick off this discussion about recovery. And with the understanding that recovery is when the specific adaptations to exercise actually occur, I'd love for you to share with us. What happens or needs to happen during recovery in order for us to get better at anything endurance strength, Etc.
But also, how specific types of exercise stimuli and specific types of adaptations that we trigger. So running a bit further, lifting a bit more weight, slowing the Cadence of a given movement, Etc. How those specific types of triggers for adaptation relate to the specific, or maybe similar types of recovery that are required for us to make progress in
one of our previous episodes, we were talking about how the Harvard fatigue lab really identified, this idea of homeostasis.
Asus or at least sort of championed it for it. And that's important because an all levels physiology wants to return to homeostasis. So what happens in terms of adaptation is you've challenged it to a level that it realizes, if it does not make a change, it will not be able to get back to the same level of homeostasis. That's fundamentally, what's happening? That is recovery. That process of taking an insult being temporarily reduced in functionality.
Causing a change. So that now we come back and get what we often call and Sport performance, super compensation. All that really is doing though is bringing you to a new level of homeostasis. Effectively, it is understanding if that same insult comes again, I need to be able to make sure that that doesn't cause the same level of disruption. And so, we raised the bar, whether this is enhancing our ability to take the same level of mechanical tension on the muscle and not result in micro
Damage, whether this is being able to take the same reduction in energy and not have that compromise sleep or anything. That's really fundamentally changing. So we can have a new level of homeostasis because it's presuming, it's predicting that that same insult is going to come again down the
road.
I want to clarify for people that when dr. Galvin says insult while he may actually insult. Me insult is the nerd speak terminology for some sort of damage inflicted to a tissue or system. So he's speaking about the insult to the muscle or insult to the neuromuscular connection created by adding more weight to the bar, running a further distance running, a bit fast or or pedaling faster.
Stir, that creates a micro insult or an insult and now because everyone is familiar with psychological and verbal insults Fair. You'll never forget that biological
concept. It's important. We tagged another thing here, which is called hormesis. It's one of my favorite phenomenon and it effectively means this that there is a dosage or toxicity responds to almost everything. And if you think about this in the context of say drugs, what this means is if I gave you 10 milligrams of something,
That it would be okay but if I give you 20 it be a problem. And eventually if I go up and give you enough, this thing turns toxic, this is a case of everything from cyanide where it can actually be in small dosages in nature. In fact, it's in many of the fruits that you eat, but it's out of dosage that it doesn't matter. If that dosage gets higher, though, that actually can cause problems, and if it is high enough, it can actually kill you instantaneously the back end of that though is because you introduced this micro insult as you framed it for me perfectly.
Your body will then adapt to it. And that's really what's happening with exercise. That updation is it is a hormetic stressor and why that's important is, if you look at the immediate responses to exercise, you see a, an extremely large increase in inflammation, you see oxidative stress, you see a whole Cascade of a toffee G like all these problems quote-unquote happen and it's that was actually quite funny. Here is as a part of my PhD the academic portion I had to go through the medical side of the school and
I was my physiology class was in med school so I'm the only non medical doctor in that class, right of my PhD. Some I'll leave my lab. I walk across campus and I take physiology class with these folks and I died the whole time internally because every time we would cover a new area, it was basically the exact same value or number in a medical setting is like, oh my gosh, they're going to die. And in performance setting is like this person is in fantastic shape. Is that I've never
It still amazes me to this day obviously, because it's just simple things like total blood volume, right? And you cover like, okay, if you have a patient come in, their blood volume 6, L immediately get him on a diuretic of some sort because they're gonna have a heart attack as blood pressure gets up right now. I'm immediately thinking Tim 6 L that that person is super fit because that is actually a positive adaptation to training is one of the most important. If not the most important adaptation to endurance training is enhanced total blood volume. So you'll store more blood in your body when you're more fit than you are less fit. So I'm going to go on all these things sodium.
Asians potassium concentrations are like you. Look at these things on paper, and you don't know if that person is about to die because they're 65 years old, and out of shape or if that person is going to break a world record the
marathon, this brings up a very important tangent, which is for instance, if you go and take a blood test and you are somebody who exercises, very intensely with resistance training, your blood creatinine levels, can be way out of rain. And if your physician doesn't know that you're doing certain forms of exercise might say wow, there's a lot of muscle tissue.
Tissue damage occurring in your body. Yeah, as you mentioned before your, total blood volume is dangerously High. When in fact you are far healthier and need much fitter than the person who has numbers would be in range. That said, obviously, there are limits to these to these statements whereby you would want to be cautious and take action to ameliorate a very elevated blood creatinine level or something of that sort. But the point you're bringing up is is also one about the field of medicine which
That many not all, but many Physicians, don't take into consideration, the outside activities that people are doing. And so it becomes a kind of plug and play type type way of looking at blood
charts. We've done many thousand athletes blood chemistry and we don't use first of all, we never look at disease stuff that's not what we do. We take people that are healthy and try to optimize performance and blood chemistry is one of the best tools if you really
And what you're doing there, you can get some incredibly powerful information out of blood. Chemistry with that actually relates to, what we're going to talk to you today. In terms of measuring everything from acute to Chronic dehydration to sleep. Deprivation can be identified in and blood chemistry to optimization improvements in nutrition supplementation. There's a lot you can get there may be people interest in that field, I would Point them to a gentleman named Ann. Garner was just an absolute Juggernaut in Wizard and blood chemistry for high performance.
You can get a ton of information from that be. If you understand the difference between exactly what you talked about. Looking for signals of increased risk of cardiovascular events, 25 years down. The road versus, is this. The optimal value for high performance in an athlete, which is what our database. And all of our software itself, does is only looking for those things. So, I'm going to talk about some of the biomarkers to look for a little bit later, salivary stuff, some blood stuff, but will maybe save that quite the conversation for down the
road, tell me about different time.
Tales of recovery.
Sure, this is actually where I was trying to answer your question for and then I got myself way off track. But the reason I brought up the Hermetic thing is, if you understand that some things in the acute, say 24 to 48 hour, period, look terrible, it's actually fine. Right? So this is the stimuli that's causing adaptation. So the reason I brought up the medical exchange there is because you if you looked at inflammatory markers and then you mention some of
You would see that they are highest acute within seconds to minutes to hours after exercise. However, that's exactly the stimuli needed to bring them down chronically. Okay? And so chronically, meaning, maybe, in that moment, they are elevated. And then maybe they're coming down, 24 hours later and 48 Hours. However, if you were to compare, your resting level say that Monday before you worked out, so you're resting level that Monday the week following week. Following that what you would probably see is your Baseline.
Inflammation goes down and so we got to be really careful. Are we talking immediately post exercise? Man, these markers. Look terrible. Maybe my recovery scores awful except that's not necessarily a bad thing. Because what we're looking to do is to not only change what's happening today, but we're trying to cause adaptation that may take us weeks or months to actually access.
I love that you're highlighting this principle because one of the more obvious ones to me, now that you've said this,
Is heart rate? Absolutely. My heart rate goes very very high during exercise and I do that fairly consistently or even semi consistently. My resting heart rate will actually be quite a bit lower. That's a fantastic example. Really what you're getting at here? Is this concept where I think it's important to differentiate between adaptation and optimization now? We hear that word and I use it and most scientists hate it but it's a good communication tool optimization.
If you're optimizing for the current moment, you're almost surely compromising the laid out updation, right? If, if I were to say, do the thing right now, that makes you feel the absolute best in the world and you're like, great, you took a nap and need a doughnut like awesome, you feel amazing but you know it's causing long-term issues. The same can be said in the back end. If you're never choosing things that make you better right now. You're never actually going to see an adaptation. So what we're really doing,
With this recovery, conversation is playing this game of balancing immediate gratification with delayed gratification and how do we identify how much to do now versus not? How do I use a value or a marker? Whether this is how tired I feel today. How sore I am today or is this a score on an app or a tracking metric? But this is a blood marker, anything and understand, if that's what I need to cause the adaptation, I want a week, a month, three months from now and the case of
Some of our other athletes is even up to four years, right? We're trying to cause that updations that will get us where we want to get in the Olympics or World Championships World Cup, or where we're going to be. So that's the framework. We have to think about recovery. We may be falsely. Think about it? Is I need to maximize my recovery today and you could do something like take an anti-inflammatory? Well, this is supplementation or a drug or maybe this is ice.
Oh cool, that's great. That will enhance your recovery. In this moment that will make you feel better today, probably tomorrow. But what we know is that blocks, the signal for adaptation. So you're not going to get the same results, you know, for 6-8 weeks from now. So, when we talk about recovery, we have to understand what tools am I using. And why in order to do that we have to understand what am I training for and what am I trying to maximize? If I am in the middle of a season with an athlete? And we are competing tomorrow. I am going to head towards a cute.
Recovery, right? Because I have to to actuate that performance right now. If I am starting the offseason, I'm not hedging towards recovery. I'm actually heading towards adaptation. So we're not going to deploy any of these especially things like there's evidence that a combination of vitamin C and vitamin E will blunt hypertrophic adaptations because their anti-inflammatory antioxidants. Right? Other end other Studies have shown maybe they don't have an inhibitory effect but they may or
I may not point is conceptually you want to be careful of what you're trying to optimize for and you have to have that for thought and that alone is going to dictate your decision making with whether or not. Again you get in the eyes, you do that. Now, we will cover some tools like massage that are pretty fine to use. You don't have to worry about those blocking long-term adaptation but others, You're Gonna Want to be very careful
about. So this principle that you've laid out for us
Which is that there's a set of events that occur during exercise that trigger the adaptation.
And that sets in motion a number of adaptations that occur during recovery that then give us the exact opposite response to what the trigger was. So I'll go back to the heart rate. Example, heart rate is close to maximum or maximal, you do that enough times within a short, you know, a week or so or two weeks and your resting heart rate goes down as I recall, a few episodes ago, you said that your maximum heart rate doesn't really change that much. Is that correct? Yes. Okay. But you're
Resting heart rate can go down quite a bit. Yep.
Is that a general theme meaning, do we have a more or less set upper limit or ceiling for things like inflammatory markers, for heart rate, maybe even things like stress. And what we do when we deliberately trigger stress or a dramatic increase in heart rate or dramatic increase in inflammatory markers, is that we are lowering the floor, but that the ceiling Remains the Same.
It's very dependent upon the marker. So in the case of maximum heart rate it will not change with the exception of one thing which is age age, brings it down, training will not change it up in most circumstances. If you look at something like an inflammatory response I suppose theoretically there is a ceiling though, I'm not aware of it. I can tell you right now, looking at blood markers, the things like creatine kinase. So, remember the conversation about metabolism and with that, we use phosphocreatine
Seen as one of our primary fuel sources for explosive exercise. Well, if we're using phosphocreatine this creatine, kinase, number kinase are enzymes that that function to break things down for the most part. So, creatine kinase is the enzyme you use to break down, greeting. When you do that, a lot, then that creatine kinase gets out of muscle and seeps into the blood myoglobin is actually another fantastic marker, by the way, myoglobin is, if you think about hemoglobin being in blood, as one of the molecule that carries oxygen around,
In the muscle tissue than its mild globe in mi meaning muscle and it's the same globulin thing. So there's a bunch of markers. You can look at muscle breakdown. And one of the things that you can see is a creatine kinase level that's elevated after say, one bout of exercise and you might, it might be up five or six fold. I've actually seen this number and offensive lineman in the NFL be something like 500 plus fold. So even within just one category to the next that number can get
ordinarily high. And if you know, this is actually one important Point here, if you're paying attention to any mechanistic research where you use your using that to inform your decision making, you have to be extraordinarily careful of magnitude. And what I mean by that is if I were to be running a western blot, looking at a signaling protein. And I'm also just did this activation of this protein turn on mitochondrial biogenesis and I saw that whatever intervention we gave it, whether it was in nutrition thing.
A drug or an exercise. And I saw that that signaling protein increased by 20%, I would basically assume that to be totally physiologically irrelevant because in order for that to be important, it totally depends on the marker you're looking at, but some markers, I might need to see four, five, six hundred fold increase before I know that that will actually be enough to be, what we call physiologically relevant others, if they're up one or two percent that is relevant and so you really want to be careful when you're either reading papers or
Looking at Social Media stuff and people are just talking about this marker increased this much. It may not matter. It may be totally, irrelevant physiologically. And so you have to that does also, if you're wondering, like, how the hell are the all these people? Well, that's how they can trick you a little bit in what intentionally or not could be just, they're trying their best, but they don't really understand that area enough. And so that's an important point to pay attention you. So, to answer your question again, fully
it would be hard to determine if there is truly a maximum level, some things don't want to move like blood pH. It doesn't really want to move the rains that you're going to move from is, you know, like six point eight to seven point four. And if you get up to like 7.9 like you're probably in big big, big trouble other things again can go up, five hundred, five thousand fold and sew the markers will really determine that answer.
Well, at some point in the future, I'd love to continue this discussion around the topic of stress specifically, and maybe we will get into that a little bit later today when we get into the use of deliberate cold exposure, because that certainly has effects related directly to temperature on tissue. But it certainly has mental effects in terms of raising ones. Level of perceived pain. It's fun. Okay, yeah, we're at some people, love it and some people love it for the feeling they get during it.
Deliberate cold exposure. Some people only like it for the feeling that they get after it. Not unlike exercise, totally, I love to train. I love exercise, but I know many people who they loathe exercise, but they love the feeling afterward. So this will be a theme that we will come back to.
Thank you for indulging, my interest in that semi tangent. I think it's a relevant tangent. If there is such a thing, you can now return us to the different time, scales and modes of recovery is the think where we are, headed is how to get better at recovering.
Yep, let's talk about the tools. Let's talk about what to measure and identify for all four of these distinct levels. So level one is, we call overload and just very quickly. What that means is I did a workout today.
The sign and symptom of overload is, you're fatigued. Acute performance is down. So I worked out hard right now, if I were to go try to do a maximum effort, I would be reduced in my ability, the recovery period for a Cute Overload is minutes to days, right? That's generally, we call a Cute Overload and that's what we're looking for, right? So we systems should theoretically see that hormetic stressor come back and response come back, bigger better, more efficient etcetera if you were to continue training,
In that state like most of us do and say I did a workout today. I had a little bit of a Cute Overload going to workout again, tomorrow a little more Cute Overload. Going to work out the next day, a little more Cute Overload, even if you took a day in between, it's that doesn't matter. You just continue these acute bouts of insult, then you're going to be pushing into the absolute golden Target, which is what we call functional overreaching. So you have over reached what you can currently do, and it results in a functional outcome, and what we mean,
Shown here is performance is enhanced and again, performance, being whatever. You deem it to be, you're stronger, you've enhance muscle size. Your mitochondria has improved, you, whatever the thing is, it's not just a physical performance thing, right? Amazing. Recovery time for functional. Overreaching is typically a few days to maybe even a week or so. And so, typically what we see happen is prior to a competition, individuals will do what we call a taper, which is a reduced training volume.
Or some short period of time. And there was the reason they do that is to again, actualize is the phrase we use here, the adaptations. And so you worked hard for six weeks and, you know, theoretically, the workouts you did three, four, five, six weeks ago. Once you allow the system to recover will be actualized, which means your performance will be enhanced here. So functional overreaching is the golden Target. Okay, if you were to be at the point of functional overreaching and you continue.
Ooh to train. So it intensified whether this was through intensity this through volume or really. As you said earlier, you had something holding back your recovery, it doesn't really matter, right? It's sort of two sides of the same coin, then you would move into what we call non-functional overreaching. So you have over reached again, but now it is non-functional as in, you did not see a positive benefit once recovery allowed.
This typically means you have weeks, it takes weeks to come back from and you basically just get back to Baseline. And this is where a lot of folks are who end up in this vicious cycle. And so you're like, man, I'm not getting the results. I want, I'm going to train harder, I'm not getting results. We want, I'm going to train harder and harder but because you've caught recovery isn't improved. You just end up in the same spot. So then you train more and you have the same spot and you end up then just either blowing up or quitting and you're not getting where you want. If you were to continue past that,
A point, you may actually be into a week, actually call overtraining and that typically is considered to be overtrained if it takes months to recover from. So most people think they're overtrained are really not, you're just probably non functionally overreached and again the classic distinction is if you took three or four days off and you feel better you weren't probably quote. Unquote overtrained you were probably just in this area of non-functional reaching you need a little bit of a back off if you and this has been
Ace I've had this happen with gymnast and a cheerleader and some other things where they take a month off and we're barely seeing them start to come back to their Baseline numbers. And any number of areas, mood, desire to train testosterone cortisol, ratios biomarkers in a number of areas physical performance vertical jump I like all these things. They just start to get back to Baseline. So over true overtraining is actually quite rare. Non-functional overreaching is much more common
And it is a shorter timeframe scale. So when we talk about recovery, those are the four pieces that were really thinking about. So, if you are concerned about, oh, I'm super sore, how do I get less? Or how do I either not be as sore next time, I do that same workout or I'm super sore. Now, how do I recover those are playing in that first category of overload and we can certainly talk about how to figure that out. But the quick answer is
You got to go back to our previous episodes and just pay attention to the volume intensity recommendations. If you're getting significantly more damage or fatigue. In a workout, you probably have increased your volume to occur too quickly or something else is dragging your stress bucket down. But generally this is a problem of training you either didn't warm up, sufficiently. You're fueling strategy is off which we'll talk about in The Next Episode or you've violated one of our principles of increasing intensity.
Volume sort of, too quickly if it's past that and you're getting to a stage where you're just, like, I'm feeling beat up all the time. My energy is going down. I'm just not feeling like I'm recovered. Now, we're in this overreaching stage, so the, the story had kind of tell. Here, always is a few years ago. I was working and my wife Natasha was in the garage training and I'm doing something and like she comes stumbling and she has this look on her eyes and they're like,
Giant her eyeballs are giant. She's just like wobbling and she's like, I have to up. I was like, what do you mean? You like effed up and she's just like, I read the program wrong and she's like trimming what did you do? Like she was supposed to be doing 10 sets of three every minute on the minute. And she did three sets of 10 every minute on the minute, and she was absolutely wrecked. She couldn't move for a few hours afterwards and then four days. She's just like you have to handle the kids. Like, I can't get out of bed. I can't move. So that was like a classic example of
All right. Like we don't need to fix recovery here. You're just a dummy and you did the drinks way too hard, too long. Like, this is not, we don't have a problem here, so if it's the case situation, like that is generally. You just the program was way off. If it's constantly happening when you're just like, man, like for whatever reason, every once in a while, I'm getting really sore. We're having a really bad performance in these workouts. Then we need to go to our other stress bucket. Take a look at our allostatic load analysis, and get figured out what's happening there.
So, those are the easy ways to flag a Cute Overload problems.
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Is it covers my vitamins? My minerals and the probiotics are especially important to me athletic greens. Also contains adaptogens, which are critical for recovering from stress, from exercise, from work or just general life. If you'd like, to try out, let it greens. You can go to athletic greens.com, / huberman, to claim a special offer, they'll give you five free travel packs and they'll give you a year supply of vitamin D3 k 2 again. If you'd like to try out, let it greens go to athletic, greens.com huberman, to claim the special offer. I'm happy that you pointed out the distinction between
Functional, overreaching, overtraining and being over trained in one common mistake, that people make in thinking about biology generally, is that they think in terms of nouns and adjectives, and not
verbs, amazing. I love that so much. You
know, biology is a collection of processes or processes depending on who you are and where you live in who you trained with
Being overtrained is a state that in many ways is an adjective your overtrained. I'm overtrained, it's like saying, you know, I'm an American. I'm a, you know, Czechoslovakia and whatever happens to be, right? And in many ways, people do start to associate with and identity at least transient identity and they start making all sorts of decisions. It sounds like about what sorts of verbs they will and will not engage in, whereas I think if we look at things as processes and
Be assigned verbs to them then we can say. Ok, I'm functionally. Overreaching or I'm truly over training which is just matter of degrees right? Or under training for that matter, I'm not I'm reaching but I'm not functionally reaching. It's just it's just performance and you know just as with the nervous system won't change unless you give it a reason to this is a reason why if you can perform something perfectly or speak a language perfectly there's there's no rewiring of the nervous system this myth.
If that we've all been told that every experience, rewires your nervous system, it's different now than it was two seconds ago. That's that's a ridiculous. A logical statement. We know that's not true. If your nervous system can perform something, it has no reason to change and it
won't muscles the same way. This is why you have to progressively overload, you have to learn something new or challenge your muscle to do something new. It's same
thing. So, in the example that you gave with your wife doing this workout, that turned out, to be far more strenuous, she had functionally overreach in some sense, she might have been over
We're heading in the direction of overtraining but the mistake would be to assume that she was overtrained, right? As a kind of, it's almost becomes a bit of a state or a character assignment as opposed to a verb. And in any case, there's no perfect way to describe this. We're talking about nouns and adjectives. And we're also talking about verbs, but I think the verbs are really anchored down in processes and things that we do actions that we can take. And so if I may, I'd like to just highlight this this idea of
Shifting one sinking towards verb actions rather than labels on the state that we happen to be in or the person that we happen to be right. Sometimes. It even does become kind of characterological in the way that people describe it. And so, I have to believe that there is something called overtraining that overtraining is real, in other words, but that we don't ever really know if we're overtrained
You nailed it. There's there's there's no, you know,
it's not like a red flag, you know, shoots up out of your shoulder and say I'm over trained you know it's so in doing so I hope that we can start thinking about some of the verbs, the actions that we can all take in order to ensure that we stimulate Progressive overload, one way or another. And at the same time that we don't fall into these bins of character assignment where suddenly we decide that we need to do X like take a month off or something like that because I am beginning to realize
From our discussion that that's exactly the wrong way to go.
Those are fantastic points. I want to make sure it is clear that there is no clinical diagnosis for overtraining there. No standards. There's no test or a blood panel, you can pull that would actually identify you in that state. So your, your distinction Here, Andrew of, these are verbs and rather than ours is so wonderful, because that is exactly the case. The only way we could really come retroactively diagnose, one with overtraining is if again we had
You did weeks of recovery and you only got back to Baseline so we can't do it in the moment. I can't take a single test. There's no subjective marker anything that says you are overtrained. It is simply, you are probably over training and we need to reverse that quickly. Or in the case, of the step before you are probably function on functionally, overreaching. And if you continue to do this, you will probably enter a new stage, where this is your overtraining, and we need to
Back. So, that's an important thing to let people know. As there's no one thing we can actually point to that says you are here, you are not a noun. This is a
verb. So what are some tools that we can use to enhance our
recovery? Yep. Let's start off with that, a Cute Overload phase. So in other words, I just did a workout and I'm feeling awful or I just did one, two days ago and I'm super sore. How do I get rid of that right now? Well, there's a couple of things you can do immediately after your workout and then others that are maybe more actionable a day later or two days later.
And we'll just cover handful of them will do some nutrition, and hydration and supplementation. And the next episode, I'm going to cover everything else, not in that category right now. So, a couple of things, number one,
You can actually start Kickstart that recovery process at the end of your current training session and I guess I should say this way, I strongly suggest you start. This recovery process immediately after the workout, you mentioned earlier about this idea of, you got to get a really high peak of stress to cause that updation but I actually didn't explain that correctly because what has to happen is you need that extremely high peak but you then you have to be met with an extremely Sharp.
Coveri back down. And so, you know, you've talked about this before in some of your neural plasticity stuff and in terms of what has to happen that caused the insult and then you immediately need to be able to recover to make sure that that causes changes in rates. Same thing happens here. So we need a really sharp and high inflammatory response. And then if you do not meet it with an immediate recovery period, the signal won't be there to maximize your results. So what's that mean, you can actually do a couple of things. Number one,
The is actually listening to slow-paced music. There is evidence to suggest fast-paced, music may slow, down your recovery and slow. Pace would actually enhance it. So if you just change from, you know, your maximum get you up and get going music during the workout to a slower lower Cadence, that will help you kick start the idea of a similar note. You can also use what we call down-regulation breathing. You could do them in conjunction or one or the other whichever is up to you. So my personal favorite method here,
Is somewhere between 3 to 10 minutes of finishing, your training session laying down. I'd like to be in a position. You could certainly do it in the Lotus position, but I think laying on your back, is generally more effective personal preference. There are no signs. I like the is being covered, getting into this dark, quiet, sort of area and then just breathing through your nose in a structured, Cadence, there's a lot of different things you can try. An easy example is just box breathing so you can imagine box having four squares.
So what you're going to do is inhale for somewhere between like 3 to 8 seconds, and whatever number you choose, you keep that same tempo. And so let's say, you chose to do a five second, inhale that's going to take you up vertically, and then horizontally for your box is a five-second, hold. And then a five second, exhale, and then a five second hole and you just need to repeat that for the time domain. The, I typically, honestly don't use a timer. You'll actually notice, a lot of people will, like fall asleep or get really close to falling asleep.
This period, you can do a triangle version of that where you do an inhale, hold exhale, and then go right back into your inhale or about there's a bunch of different tricks you can try here. You need to play around and see what actually works best for you. Ten minutes is probably better, but if you can just at least give me three, that'll work. If you're really really resistant, you can actually do that, just in the shower. And so, if you're going to finish your workout, get in the shower again, just close your eyes in the shower. Give me three minutes of focused relaxation, breathing.
Thing and that will accelerate the recovery
process. I love it. And I particularly love it because my laboratory works on stress and respiration. Okay? Breathing, and the interactions between the two and I'll just mention a result. That was just accepted for publication. So should be out by the time this episode airs. Thank you. This is the beautiful work of not me directly, although it took place in my lab, but as we know it's the student, the postdocs, hopefully, do the heavy lifting of dr. Melis bulb on in my lab.
Phenomenal researcher, that showed that a short period of five minutes of box, breathing of exactly the type that you described or cyclic sighing. So to inhales followed by an extended, exhale to lungs empty, ideally the inhales are done through the nose, the exhales are done through the mouth, although it could all be done through the nose or the mouth for that matter. But probably nose nose for inhale, inhale mouth for Excel, or in inhales through.
The nose and exhale through the nose sick like sighing, as we refer to it done, 45 minutes, both of those produce, very significant decreases in resting, heart rate the over time will increase things like heart, rate, variability and so on and so forth. So provided that there are extended exhales, it seems like the common response and the reduction in overall stress occurs. The only thing that really sends things in the other direction would be something like cyclic hyperventilation. I'm sure you've observed.
That and interestingly, when we had people just do five minutes of meditation which during which of course they are breathing, but they're just allowing their breathing to progress. However, it happens to be in that moment or moments across the five minutes. There were reductions in the same sorts of markers of stress that I described but not as significant as breathing. So, I love the Brock's breathing tool, post workout, and there's some other Alternatives. There are two just
Mention. But I think people greatly underestimate the potency of breathing for shifting. One's nervous system function away from stress or if one wants toward more alertness and
stress I actually have a couple questions for you on that. Sure. I think the audience would appreciate this. How long were those boxes? Does it just use your
selected. Great questions. So we use the carbon dioxide tolerance test. Amazing. In order for people to determine how long the different sides of the Box should be a new cover carbon dioxide.
Just in a previous episode that we can provide a link to that clip in the show notes captions. But as you point out, involves a long extended, exhale to lungs empty and of course people could sit with lungs empty but they have to accurately reflect fairly. As we say report how long it took them to empty their lungs. We use that as a gauge. Typically if it takes if people go to lungs empty and 20 seconds or less, I believe I have to go back to the paper and look but I believe that the duration for each of the
Sides of the boxes as it were was somewhere between two and three seconds. If they had a CO to discard time of anywhere from 20 seconds up, to about 40, 45 seconds, we use it. The sides of the box where I believe between 4 and 6 seconds. And then for people longer than a who could discard there are over a period of a minute or more, we used a box duration that is inhale, hold exhale, whole duration of somewhere between
I believe it was seven or maybe it was eight and as long as 11 or 12 seconds though some get your kind of freediver types. You can really do this who are really well trained for this sort of thing. The don't quote me exactly on those numbers but that was
approximate those line up exactly with what we've done. So I believe it's going to be close within seconds of non important distinction is it's going to be close enough so that's great. And that was it took them what six weeks before my eyes to this
study.
He was done over the period of a month and then when they were swapped into a new pattern of breathing condition or meditation condition, and this was all done, Austin in the natural world. As we say they were wearing, whoop bands, that were getting heart rate, heart rate, variability, sleep data. Subjective data about mood, Etc. So there are a lot of measures, but this was more than 100 subjects out in the wild of life. And we tried as best, we could to track life stress events and exercise and things like that at, that was harder to control.
Side the laboratory, really all those results speak to exactly what you're describing here, which is that deliberate respiration that involves controlled holds. And exhales really has a dramatic and very immediate impact on reducing our levels of stress.
That's wonderful. I'm not surprised at all with your findings and what's really interesting about that is you mentioned how the exhalation portion is primarily responsible for the down regulation and that's actually goes back.
Back to our previous endurance conversation, which is that in general at rest at non altitude increases in CO2 are the primary driver for ventilation. And so what that generally means is inhales are associated with an uptick and sympathetic State and exhales are associated with a uptick of parasympathetic State. This is generally. Why folks will do things like exhale and finish that exhale right before they perform a very high.
Precision neurological task. So if you're going to say aim at a Target and shoot, you're going to Exhale fully and then almost always execute that movement at the end of the exhale, because that's when you and your highest parasympathetic State and lowest driver ventilation. I have to say, I'm not surprised at all that you guys found that there's actually other data that point, two individuals, particularly after endurance training that can get back down to Baseline, heart rate is going to be correlated with who gets the most actual
To their training said that if you take a bunch of individuals and put them through endurance, training program. And if you measure how quickly they can get back down to Baseline after each workout in general, those folks that are better at that are going to see greater improvements in performance. At the end of your say 4 6, or 8 week, training block. And so there's a little bit of causation and correlation there that we have to untie. But I think it's enough to say hey if you invest these three
In your case, your study was five minutes. It's only going to enhance recovery, you have a likelihood of increasing the results from your training. And now we also have additional benefits like being able to transition more appropriately into our next task. Going to work going to see, family, whatever the thing is and it's a nice clothes too. I asked you to be in a high sympathetic State body and I asked you to perform and to be under stress I gave
A view recovery and now we're ready to transition in our next thing. So that we don't take that exercise energy. If you will into our next task, which may or may not want me in a sympathetic Drive
state. So, somebody is sore following a workout, either locally sore in a muscle group or group of muscles may be in their legs or chest or so, maybe their whole body is sore as it sometimes is the case.
What are some tools that they can Implement in order to accelerate the want to call moving out of that soreness? But it's really as we know the alleviation of the soreness through a bunch of different processes. What are the most effective tools to push back on that soreness and
dissipate it? Yeah, absolutely. First of all it's not lactate. That's just a really important thing that we still hear people talk about is, you know, you're sore 24 hours later. You got to do this thing to get the lactate out of there as we talked about in the metabolism.
Some conversation and episode that that is not the cause of fatigue. And it's certainly not the cause of soreness, so not an actionable tip there but just a pet peeve of mine when I hear people say that I get irritated so we can maybe in that conversation. Strategies tools. Here's what you can do. You can actually wear compression gear, that will help a little bit. There is a decent amount of evidence suggesting. If you just were to, you know, put some tighter fitting clothes on Leisure wear or compression gear. If you have it at that can actually
Really prevent a little bit of soreness from occurring. So if you're in the case of poor Natasha, and you realize you just done way way, way too much or you went and hung out with your bow, hunting friend, and you train way too hard. And you realize, oh my goodness, I'm going to be very sore here, you can immediately put on compression gear and way that really for as long as possible,
what are some examples of compression? Your I've seen people on the plane with those high high socks,
yum. I mean, anything that you wear compression gear for what you do for exercise. So whether these are just you
Compression pants and leggings, the tight-fitting leggings whether this is a long sleeve shirt, that's like a rash guard, you would wear in Jiu-Jitsu or surfing, or something like that. As long as it's tight fitting, it doesn't have to be much more than that. You can wear. Yeah, I suppose you could get the socks would be great. But we generally, just tell our athletes. They put on long sleeve, compression shirts that they would wear for their training, and then long compression leggings and that'd be fine.
Kitten people apply these compression.
Garb after training and still get some of the positive effects.
Yeah, I have not seen any evidence to suggest that that would block a Temptation that may be the case. I am not aware of those studies if that happens but I certainly know that the information suggests it can hands a little bit of
Muscle Recovery but ideally one knows if they are about to do a workout, that could trigger a lot of soreness. Yeah. And then where's compression gear of some sort to offset that and if so
does it have to be local to the muscle groups that you're working on? The reason I asked about the socks is my understanding the socks that the compression socks people were on the plane is that, it's going to shift patterns of blood flow, not just in the lower legs, but all over the
body. Yeah. You're probably going to want to focus it on the actual exercising tissue though. Actually, that's really good question. I don't know, the answer of whether or not you did an upper body workout. Only wore lower body compression gear. If that would actually help. That's a great question that may have been done. I don't know but I don't know the answer to that and general, we just tell people like where where the whole thing as much.
Can I actually am not concerned that you're wearing it during your workout? It is something you could put on afterwards or even where it is a little bit of compression the other day. We've actually did a really fun study. I collaborated with Bill Kramer who's Sports scientist of the Year. Award is the bill Kramer Lord. If that gives you an indication out of University of Connecticut as well as with Lee Brown. So to Lifetime Achievement, Award winners. And really we put people on a plane and
In Storrs Connecticut and flew them to Cal State Fullerton. So a cross-country flight and some of them got to wear compression gear during the flight and others did not and then they landed in California. Did a training bout, put them back on the plane, went back to stores and I think they did another training about when they got back. There was a lot of data that came out of that paper. But one of the things that was clear is the compression group was effective at handling, some of the blood related coagulation and other issues associated with long flight.
And particularly athletic performance. So that's actually a sneaky little Insider trick that. I'll use a lot with people particular things that are traveling is just where that compression gear on the plane. So you talked about that and that sort of run that study to mind that as another effective strategy. So compression gear in general as well as particularly on a plane. Basically the tighter you can get it the better without obviously making your hands purple and being uncomfortable and things like that. So it doesn't have to be overly tight. Anything will work and probably help. So I'm also doing
That personally anytime I'm taking a flight like that as much as I can that's just to feel a little better when I get there.
So what are some other methods that we can use to alleviate acute? Soreness?
Well if we continue down the same theme which is saying okay we'll use some sort of pressure manipulation to enhance recovery. If compression is one strategy you can also use things like compression boots or garments and these are nomadic devices that will pump air out.
Side. You can compress back and forth. There's any number of devices that will do this. You can also use the physical hand, so this would be massage and Bodywork, they're all really working. As best we can tell on the same mechanisms which are effectively moving fluid in and out of the tissue, as well as potentially enhancing. Blood flow, increase in capitalization and which is going to only get nutrients in and waste products out. So you can kind of pick and choose based upon your budget preferences availability.
Timing, things like that. So those are all effective strategies outside of that really is the next largest category, which is now thermal and so far in this discussion, we've mentioned Coldwater, immersion and I talked about in the hypertrophy section, how you would not want to do that immediately post exercise, which would be getting into cold water or an ice bath. If you're trying to grow muscle mass, having said that there is good evidence showing that Coldwater immersion.
Glee is effective at reducing muscle soreness. So it is a fair consideration and it's a classic example of how there are no free passes and Physiology. Nothing is always good are always bad. It's always about what are you willing to give up and versus what you're willing to do? Get and the case of like Coldwater immersion you may be thinking yeah, I might want some hypertrophic adaptations, but if you're in that phase of training where you're actually trying to push more towards optimization in that moment rather than long-term out.
Temptation. Then a, a nice bath might be a great choice. In addition, if you fall into a scenario like Natasha did and you realize, like I'm just so unbelievably sorry this might cost me three or four or five or six days of training. It might be worth it for you to accelerate that recovery process by a couple of days so that you don't miss so much training. So it's just a, it's an algorithm, it's an equation. What am I looking for again if I'm in the season or trying to compete or if I have just done way way, way too much exercise, and I'm really insignificant
Pain. You would probably be willing to give up some small percentage of eventual muscle growth after a single session to get out of pain. So all of the cold strategies Coldwater immersion is clearly the best approach rather than cold air or some other tactics. So a cold showers, probably not enough here. You really do want to be either in moderately cold. This is maybe 40 to 50 degree water for probably north of 15 minutes or you can be in sub 40 for as little as maybe five minutes to get some of the factory.
There's been a number of studies, some sort of summarizing a bunch of that kind of into one, rather than going through them Point by point
the numbers. You just threw out, which I'm assuming or Fahrenheit scene, seemed
really cold to me. Alright, uncomfortably cold. Absolutely.
So I always recommend that people ease into it as a protocol, overall that they not immediately. Go to 35 degree, cold water. If they've never done it before, that said, once people
All are comfortable being uncomfortable because I always answer the question. How cold should it be? Exactly. Would you agree that? It should be very, very cold, so much. So that you really, really want to get out, but that you're able to stay in safely, whatever that value happens
to be, you, absolutely need to be safe. Having said that we have actually in our xpt Retreats put dozens, if not hundreds of people at this point. Immediately into the sub 35-degree water. Their first time, ever and done in three minutes.
Multiple rounds and a session, so they can handle it, but you don't need to go that crazy. If you don't want, you kind of have to play a game, right? You want to be really, really cold for a short amount of time or you want to be like, kind of cold for a longer amount of time. Really, the only mistake you can make is doing something like, you know, 65 degree water, which is for the most, people is not very comfortable and doing five or ten minutes. It's just not gonna be, it's probably not going to be effective. So if you're like man, 35 is absolutely crazy and you want to do
E5 degree water and there's literature in that area but it's going to say you need to probably be there. Some were almost really north of 10 minutes and some of it will actually show you need to be in there like well north of 20 to 30 minutes. So for my money, I would rather go really really cold and get it done in five minutes, but personal preference on this one. You can also make it a little bit easier on yourself. There is not nearly as much evidence, but there is some on contrast stuff. So this is when you go cold hot sort of back and forth.
There are no really good rules in terms of how much should you go? How many rounds, how long I'm cold? How long and hot again, there have been a couple of studies but and obviously those studies use numbers. But that doesn't mean those have been tested to see what our optimal which is a very big difference so you can really just kind of play that by feel hot is good for Recovery. You just have to be careful because your are going to put more blood flow in the area and so your you may walk out of there with some additional acute swelling.
Which is then going to put greater pressure on there. So you have to kind of play with that. I personally, really like hot for Recovery. I will feel maybe not great in that moment. But the next day I tend to feel really, really good. In addition, if I wake up the next morning and I'm really, really hurting and I'm super stiff. A hot bath will help that quite a bit so you can play with some of those protocols. I can you don't have to do ice, there's obviously no requirement to do. So it is just an option, if you're interested.
In the studies of dr. Seuss anise oberg? Sure. Yeah, are not directly aimed at alleviating soreness or recovery. There more about increasing thermal capacity by a storage of brown. Adipose tissue, not the blubbery fat but the stuff around the clavicles and around the heart that help you generate body heat at rest and metabolism. And so on, and the numbers there that she's come up with again, have not been tested against all the possible derivation,
It's just like, with breathing, we did five minute sessions, but who knows. Maybe a minute would have been equally effective. We just, there are constraints on these sorts of studies, but the values that she's come up with, which seemed to be good thresholds, for making sure that an adaptation response is triggered by heat and cold. Is it ends up being 57 minutes per week? Total of uncomfortable, but safe heat? And that case sauna and that can be all in one session or breaking it up into a couple of sessions on the same day or different days and then 11 minutes per week of coal.
Either in one single session or multiple sessions again. One could do more one, could break that up over, you know, multiple days, or do it all in one day or do it all in one, you know, an hour in the sauna and then 11 minutes in the colder, vice versa. Although, that seems a little bit extreme especially for the uninitiated but those are the numbers that have been studied. But as you point out, there are not a lot of really thorough studies examining different cold, protocols, according to temperature, by time requirements. So there is a bit of subjective feel required to establish a
routine and
I would actually say this is another time to re-emphasize something we talked about at the beginning of our conversation, which is that pain itself is not a defined outcome. It's heavily influenced by your perception. And so if you don't feel like they work for you, they won't work. If you feel like they work fantastic. They do. So it's a challenging field to get really objective data on. So there's always going to be a little bit of subjective nature to some of these things. I can tell you anecdotally, we've used hot and cold
Just for a long time, that leads some love it, some don't care for it and everything in between. So it's one of those things were
I never mandated of course I can't mandate anything for anyone. I work with but I've never, you know, like hey are you interested great, you struggling this area? You want to try this, you did and you like the great, you're struggling in this area and you try to didn't love it. Okay. Fine. I'm not, we'll find other routes as we will get into. There's a lot of ways to enhance recovery. This is only one and it hasn't even really come down to stopping the problem in the first place. We're not, we're just treating symptoms, which is
Is first line of defense, but you really need to go back and figure out why it's happening to begin with as a solution. These are just different like an acute symptom management tactics.
One final point about deliberate cold exposure. I think worth mentioning is one of the reasons the shower is effective but not nearly as effective as Coldwater immersion or immersion in ice up to the neck is simply because of the reason you stayed before which is that most showers are not going to get that cold and I can get down you know into the
Sub 40s. Also, cold showers haven't really been studied that much. They have, but not nearly as much as immersion. And people always ask why I just think about the challenges of studying cold, water, exposure in the shower, where you can't really control for mango, how much of the body is covered whether or not the head stays under different sized bodies, Etc. Whereas, when people come into a laboratory, they can get into a cold war till we know where the neck is, we know where the chin is and we can make sure that people's arms and legs are underneath.
But with cold shower, sure, you can make everyone face away or toward the shower, but it's really tricky and for all the variations that were described that said, would you agree that if one wants to use deliberate cold exposure that cold shower is better than nothing and cold immersion in circulating, cold water or ice bath is better than than cold
shower? Yeah. What I'd actually say if you're looking for recovery for muscle soreness, I would say cold. Shower is probably doing very little
You're not going to be able to get enough cold water onto any muscle besides basically your head. So maybe you could try a cold bath and so you at least get some surface area coverage. But yeah, if you want to use cold shower for all the other awesome reasons to cold shower, that's totally great. But if you're trying to use that to recover your low back and glutes from being sore from training and a good way, it's probably not going to do much of the. The immersion would be there. You actually also hit a sneaky other point which is if you can't get your water super cold, just make the
Remove. So if you have Jets to stuff, you can turn on anyone who's tried this and you're like, okay, I can do a 40-degree bath. Awesome. Try 60 when the water is
moving, right? Because you break up the thermal layer. Normally you have a little thin layer of water that you're heating up. You break that out. It's a whole new world. Yeah, absolutely. So being very still in the cold. Water is actually the weaker way to go correct that you can make your face stoic but make your body circulate some water around you as long as we're on this, maybe just one more point about heat. I've certainly use
On a, let's on a dry sauna steam. Samet saunas. Excuse me, jacuzzis can work pretty well. Yep. Males if you are looking to conceive in the 60 days, following following sauna, or hot tub, do realize that it that both those approaches do severely limit the number of motile sperm substantially. So for people that are not trying to conceive a, don't think that this works reliably enough that you could use as a form of
Ception. Yeah, but but for people that are trying to conceive, it really is detrimental to sperm Health, right? And so for that reason, some people bring an ice pack and put it on the groin or near the groin when they go in, but which is hard to do in a hot tub, then a sauna. So here we're getting into the fine points or crude points if you will pun intended. But but the idea is that we wouldn't want anyone to approach these techniques and compromise there. Other life goals,
I was certainly not allowed anywhere near these things when
We were at that stage of Life, follow to say that Natasha put an X and ay on me hanging out with layered. So
everything is going in that in the
sucking up for those reasons. He's like you're not going in, you're not going to none of the stuff and I just had to
wait, right? He he and sperm have a relationship but it's not one that's positive for the sperm. I'd like to take a brief break to acknowledge our sponsor inside tracker inside tracker is a personalized nutrition platform. The analyzes data from your blood and DNA to help you better understand your body and help you reach your health goals. I've long been a believer in getting
Aguilar blood work done for the simple reason that many of the factors that impact your immediate and long-term health and well-being can only be analyzed from a quality blood test. One issue with a lot of blood test and DNA test out there. However, is that you get information back about various levels of lipids, and hormones, and metabolic factors Etc. But you don't know what to do with that information inside tracker makes knowing what to do with all that information exceedingly, easy. They have a personalized platform that lets you see what your specific numbers are. Of course. But then also, what sorts of Behavioral do's and don'ts.
What sorts of nutritional changes, what sorts of supplementation would allow you to bring those levels into the ranges that are optimal for you. If you'd like to try inside tracker, you can visit inside tracker, dot, coms huberman, to get 20% off any of inside trackers plans. Again, that's inside tracker. Dot coms huberman to get 20% off. Are there ways to combine the various types of stimuli that you described for inducing recovery? You talked about breathing based tools which while they could adjust
Just and indeed do adjust oxygen, and carbon dioxide ratios and Etc. I'm guessing the major effect of those on recovery is going to be neural. It's going to be deliberate calming of the nervous system more sympathetic based. As you mentioned. Yeah most definitely and then you talked about some movement based and touch based approaches which will movement certainly certainly will circulate blood but also will generate contractions of the muscles. Yeah. Right. Which maybe if indeed again, it's still speculative. If indeed
some of the soreness is due to excessive stretch or swelling at the stretch ends of the muscles, that would make sense. So movement in touch and then thermal are there ways to combine these that are more effective or maybe even synergistic. Yeah, I suppose you could throw on some compression. Garment put on a Pneumatic compression device and sit in the sauna while you down regulate your breath like, that would be fine.
Quite honestly though you probably don't need to maximize all of them. We were joking you could probably go for a light swim while regulating your breathing and cold water. You get the compression from the cold water and you'd be in a good spot so you can certainly do that. The reality is I generally look for some physical approach and then some holistic approach of the breathwork, basically. So I want breath and then something else. If you knock those two things out, you're in a good spot. So that could be breath while
You're in thermal stress. So just controlling and doing the on regulation sub. You have to also remember ice is a stressor and I'll actually show you some data here in a second about how that actually can enhance systemic recovery. Although it won't happen in the men in the equipment is, in fact, it's going to take at least 30 to 60 minutes and then you'll eventually see a rebound effect. But acutely, it's going to make you actually more sympathetic, which is going the other direction. He can do the opposite.
Or I can actually drive you up. So it's a little bit depending upon how you respond, what time of day and how you're using. So, in general, I guess finding them is if you need it depending on what you have, what's available. So perhaps you don't have a sauna but you can take a hot bath great, maybe you have some percussion device some tool and you can use that. But you don't have a sauna amazing. Don't have ice about these think. So I think rather than thinking about an optimal combination.
Nation of them, I would say just use a couple of the tactics based on what you have and what is easily available in your
situation. I'd love for you to teach us about some of the methods for longer form recovery as it relates to overreaching and overtraining.
Sure you want to think about this in a couple of phases. Phase one is to try to prevent it from happening in the first place in terms of training load. You're going to just go back to our previous episodes where we talked give you specific instructions for how much to increase your volume.
Intensity per week, etcetera. The other thing you can do then is, do some monitoring and I'll go over some different tools. Some cost free ones as well as some higher technologically demanding ones to monitor to see if it's actually happening. And then the third approach here is what if this is already occurred, I figure it out. I'm so, how do I get back out of that hole? So I would like to just sort of tackle, these one by one in order and and talk about what's happening what tools you can use and why they're going to work. All right, so any time we're talking about
Fatigue management here. Most people are aware of these terms, because if you have any sort of Technology, you're probably getting some sort of Readiness score or recovery score or strain, depending on which app or watch or Tech you have you have a little bit of an ocular change. If you're in the sport performance world you might be looking at things again like load or a GPS tracking and monitoring and really all of it is doing the same thing. It's trying to either one
predict a problem is going to happen in future and then placing restrictions upon you so that you don't run into that situation. The other thing is possibly doing is identifying a drop in physiology or performance and then saying, we need to get you out of this hole. That's really what's happening. And so, when we think of the first one, just imagine a scenario like a mileage. Limitation pitch, count and baseball, and what was happened. There is
You know, individuals in those fields have looked and said, hey, what we notice is people who throw say more than 100 pitches in a game tend to start losing Effectiveness and increase the injury rate. Therefore, we're predicting the next time you go to play. If you cross that threshold, we start having an increased risk of negative consequences. So therefore we're going to cap your in this case, pitching volume at that hundred pitches per game or whatever the case, same thing with running, etc, etc. So you can just simply do that and there's actually really cool data coming out.
Out now on sport performance stuff. Looking at things like I am using GPS trackers and trying to identify even position by position specific recommendations for how much distance you should try a cover and a practice, and a training session. So that you can say, hey, these positions don't cross this threshold. These positions don't cross this threshold and basketball and tennis and all kinds of things like that. That's not probably extremely applicable to many of the listeners right now, but it is still conveying the idea that
that if we understand where we break, then we can stop ourselves from getting there in the first place. The functional example, here is just thinking about basic things like where do I start my training program and then how do I progress it? And we've already covered those numbers in either case though you want to have three markers that you're paying attention to. If you're concerned you're getting into an overreaching phase or potentially going to lead to overtraining or you want to get out is three unique things. Number one,
We're going to look for some sort of performance metric, right? So this could be your times are going down. Your squat numbers, your power is going down, any of these things. So, it's got to be an actual performance number to some sort of physiology. And so I want to see something happening with resting heart rate. Some biomarkers moving heart rate, variability, some other measure, that is not influenced by you and the beauty of using
biological markers are if we contrast that to like performance and I said, okay here's our performance test every day. You come in, you're going to do a vertical jump and if one day you come in, I'll send your vertical. Jump is super low. I might think, oh man, maybe we're starting to overreach. You also could be feeling lazy that day and just not have jump very high on purpose because you didn't want to work out the beauty of biomarkers. Are you don't get to manipulate them like that. They don't care. There's a downside to it, which is maybe they're just indirect markers.
All right, and so I'm not selling you biological markers of better than performance markers. What I'm saying is you want to look at both? All right, in fact, you want to look at our third category as well, which is some sort of symptomology. And so am I, why am I having a symptom of overreaching? Am I seeing a performance decrement and then am I saying a biological marker as well. If you see all three of these popping up, you have reason to believe you've reached some over reaching.
Now what you have not identified yet is if that is functional overreaching.
Non-functional overreaching or true overtraining and remember, you shouldn't be feeling great after every training session, you're trying to cause that up, tation and until you back off, maybe even weeks or months later to actualize the adaptation and get that, super compensation and performance increase. You're going to have to invest a little bit. So you're going to go in the hole. Any sport performance, coach is going to look at numbers throughout the year and say, yeah, when we first start training and preparation for the season, we are going to see a drop in performance.
That day that week, that's part of the plan. The right? That's this stress. You're trying to accumulate. So you want to see all three of those markers you just want to pay attention to a couple of things. How long are they down for a day? Three days, seven days, 15 days, Etc. If you're seeing a performance drop in a day and I am far away from from performance. So the day that I want to pick for, I'm not going to do anything different. If I see, two days in a row drop.
Performance. I'm not worried if I see more than probably in my opinion, five days in a row of decrement, then I might start paying attention,
If you're in season though, or close to competition or whatever that thing means to you, and you see more than a couple of days in a row of dropping, then you might actually want to take some some steps to mitigate that. So it really is important to understand. Again, what are we trying to do? Are we trying to cause that updation or trying to cause a Temptation? And I have a very specific example, of all this, we can run through here in a second and then, of course, a bunch of tools to pull you out of those phases. But that's, that's fundamentally what we're trying to do.
Do here, I would encourage you again. Don't be too reactive and responsive to any one measure to cover a whole bunch of them in a second, but you can get lost in different things because they all have pros and cons. And so, I know it's simple to just look at one, score on your watch, and make your decisions because of that or check your app, but you really want to be careful of doing that. You're going to probably lead yourself in the wrong direction more often than you're going to help yourself.
I'm curious as to why when we overreached.
Much, or too often, or we are over training that performance is diminished because on the face of it, it's kind of obvious, you're overreaching your overtraining. So performance is diminished, but that's completely circular. You hear about things like, adrenal, fatigue and adrenal burnout. Well, it turns out adrenal burnout doesn't even really exist. Absolutely nothing. There is such a thing as adrenal insufficiency syndrome, but course, you know, these phrases like burnout, adrenal burnout overtraining,
They're thrown around, you know, as much as a words like gas lighting and obsessive-compulsive, you know, are without any real clinical definition or there are clinical definitions but people aren't obeying them when they use the language. I do want to acknowledge, however, what is absolutely true, which is that overreaching too much too often over training, these can degrade performance, but mechanistically speaking, what's going on? Because I think if once we understand what's going on mechanistically,
Then I think we can all look at tools, whether or not it's breathing movement, compression thermal psychological motivational, Etc, and have a much clearer sense as to what's going to work best and what likely won't work.
I love this question so much. Because as I mentioned at the beginning, I was fortunate to spend my some of my graduate work and Andy fries Lab at the University of Memphis. And we did a lot in this area. And so, we fact this is how
How I learned, how to do assays and run, Western blots and measure signaling proteins and things like this. So this stuff is near and dear to my heart. We also did a bunch of really wild studies and he had done some before I got there. So I'm going to combine kind of antifreeze entire career and just highlight some of the big pictures of what he found there. He was very interested in exercise particularly strength training and trying to figure out this entire question, right? Which is likewise
Is this actually happening? When I work out too much? When I lift too much, that all the sudden, I can't sleep. What's happening, like, why is my energy down? Why is my mood? My motivation reduced. If I squat too much, so, we did a whole series of studies across his career. And again, I'll just sort of highlight some of the, the some of the themes that ran through them. So the first one that comes out to mine is really his career. He did this really awesome protocol where he had people squat 100% of their back, squat Max every day for two weeks.
So you come into the gym and I think this first one was on a machine and you did a one rep max and then you came back in every single day for two weeks. So these are what we would generally call, kind of like that, short to moderate range overreaching and by definition some of them end up actually being true over training because it would take the individuals sometimes to, to up to eight weeks to return back to their one rep max at the end of these protocols. So, some of them were non-functional reaching or some combination of that.
Well, along with that, he took a lot of blood samples, as well as muscle biopsies to try to look at what's happening and ecologically. Neurologically muscle physiology wise to pay attention to happen. So, a couple of things that jump out there, one of his initial studies, actually, I think the very first one, he did when they ran that first squat everyday protocol.
What they found is catecholamine levels, changed quite significantly and depending on kind of what you wanted to pay attention to their whether it was epinephrine or norepinephrine or even some other markers. They basically increased by somewhere between two to threefold and so a little bit of understanding of sleep physiology, if adrenaline is extremely high but not from you're going to have a hard time sleeping. So that alone was first indication. This is like wait a minute. Something's actually happening here that's just beyond muscle soreness.
Some sort of systemic fatigue happening. And as you rightfully pointed out is not the adrenal glands, becoming fatigued. That's sort of a bit of tongue in cheek and pedantic sit is cortisol, this regulation and general stress syndrome but it's really can be noted in blood in terms of epinephrine and norepinephrine. Another study he had done of a similar realm, was over the course of seven. Half days of people came in and did 15 training sessions. So, it was really cool. These are these really short bouts.
So just ridiculous training and they said, okay, like something's happening with with epinephrine and norepinephrine some have something's happening with testosterone. What's it look like inside the cell. So now muscle biopsies came on board and they started looking at things like map kinases which are these signaling proteins that are tend to be associated with an anabolic response. Say upregulate muscle protein synthesis and they do many other things but that's like a big factor of them. They looked at various androgens and glucocorticoid receptor.
And they wanted to see like well, maybe receptor density or and, or sensitivity is changing. And in fact, surprise surprise, that's exactly what they found. So they found both antigen and glucocorticoid receptor concentrations were reduced. And so you can start to see a picture for me, which is like, hmmm. Very similar to the insulin type 2, diabetes story where you've you've really put yourself in a very high-stress situation. So, presumably epinephrine, Etc. Testosterone really
Aces are extremely high in response to that, to try to reach back to some level of homeostasis. You start down regulating The receptors for them, and so it's like the signal can only get so high. If you're going to keep that gas on, we're going to pull back the throttle and the receptor, so that the total signal stays the same. If that makes a little bit of sense, well, that becomes obviously problematic. So then I like a final follow-up study here. That is important to note is they did another protocol, which is really, really cool and they said the first ones weren't enough. So how about,
This we're going to come in every day for two weeks and we're going to do ten sets of a one rep max every day. So they were coming in and they would do 10. 1 rep max has every day for two weeks and what's really cool about the study? If they didn't complete any of the repetitions, they had to repeat it until they had 10 successful. One rep. Max has on that given day. Absolutely brutal. Brutal protocol, I wasn't there at the time, they had finished that
before I got on campus, but I was actually able to be around when they were doing some of the final analysis there. The tissue what they want to look at in this particular study was beta adrenergic receptors, which are those receptors, what that are going to be epinephrine and such are going to be binding for. So again, similar story here perhaps are we losing overall sensitivity? Because of this extreme sympathetic stimulation now actually thinking back what would have been pretty cool as if they had another group that did it and did some down-regulation breathing post to see if that can ameliorate some of the problems. But no of course, this was
Me plus years ago or something like that. So, A couple of things that happened is the one rep max has dropped by a think around, like eight kilos. By the end of the two weeks, if I remember, right? Like the group average was something in the neighborhood of 150 1 kilo. So, these were pretty well trained individuals. And it went from rather I think actually it was about 160 kilos and they dropped the like, 150, two kilos, something close to that. What was more significant though?
Was their power dropped by 35%?
Which is really really interesting because if, if you pay attention to declines in physical performance over time and I mean, that like through aging, what you'll see is people can hold on the muscle mass pretty. Well, it will go down to buy about, you know, 1% or so. After the age of 40, however, strength will go down at, like, 2 to 4 percent and then Power by eight to ten percent. And if you look at actually Road records across strength Sports by age, you'll see that they will decline.
By age, but not that much. However, if you look at Speed Sports by age, they fall off the planet. So it's very challenging to preserve fast Through Time. Whether this is fatigue or because of age, that's really important, because that will, then tell you, hey, little bit of a canary in the coal, mine is not necessarily your strength, but your speed and so a lot of different techniques that we use
To measure performance. Remember, that's our Triad, right? Symptomatology physiology and performance. You're generally better looking at speed based performance tests rather than strength, based performance tests to get an earlier indication of potential overreaching or overtraining. So anyways, back to the the individual study there in that same group again. We have the same problem where it took some of them to 28 weeks to come back. So what they had to do is I can remember the exact time frame, I probably should have
Thought through this but they had to come back something like every week or every couple of days even after the study finished until they got back to their Baseline one, rep max. And some of them had took them up to eight weeks before they finally got back. So they probably were in a classic overtraining stated that place which is was done in as little as two weeks. And this is also another point that people always ask, like how like, how long does it take? Is this something that has to happen over the course of months or it like, if I were to go do two days or this intense
Training camp for two or three weeks could. I actually cause our training. And the answer is if it is actually truly enough volume and enough, intensity, you probably can do some significant damage in as little as two weeks. Probably doesn't happen that often most likely you, you're probably going to be reaching a state of non-functional overreaching, but you may actually be able to put yourself in a position where I might take three or four weeks or more to get back to Baseline after a truly intense. And again, think about this protocol. It's like totally unrealistic for the most
Part 10 sets of one of a one rep, max squat. Every day for two straight weeks. Some folks, if you're extremely highly trained weightlifter, you might do something like that when you're very close to say, World Championships, but outside of that really specific scenario, it's a totally absurd training protocol, but that was the point, right? We were trying to ensure ensure that overtraining was met or close. It's similar to when we've done and we've actually done. I think three
That is in the center for performance on Dom's muscle soreness. And all those cases you do just like ridiculous leg extension protocols because you're just trying to ensure you cause super soreness. If you don't, then you have nothing to study, so absurd, training calls, protocols, but that's the point. So nonetheless, as a result, sure enough, the beta adrenergic receptors were down regulated by something like 37 percent. What's probably even more significant though, was the sensitivity in those
L was reduced by like two and a half fold and so it's like okay, wait a minute, we're becoming desensitized to this time, we lie. And we're also actually now starting to reduce our total concentration similar, which is actually an interesting was very sneaky smart thing to do is they looked at nocturnal urinary epinephrine and guess what? That was also up by like 50 percent
and 16 15, 50 50.
Yeah. And so now you're seeing this tie-in where it's like, mmm,
I'm seeing a response at the tissue level. I'm seeing a response probably, although they didn't actually look at pituitary and like that. I'm seeing adrenal and other endocrine logical problems. And then I'm also seeing this increase in concentration have been epinephrine when I'm supposed to be sleeping and surprise surprise. I'm having a hard time, sleeping
symptomatology. That's a very interesting finding about nocturnal epinephrine or epinephrine, of course is adrenaline. It's released from the adrenals knows.
Is there, but also from this brain area called Locus coeruleus in the brain and the Brain tends to be called epinephrine in the body. Adrenaline just to complicate everyone understanding. But that nomenclature did not come from us. So don't blame us the point, is that rapid eye movement sleep, so called REM sleep is more abundant in the second half of the night. We know that the dreams associated with rapid eye movement, sleep are more emotionally Laden and that those
Teams and those emotional states are actually important for discarding, the emotional load of previous day's experiences, its access sort of a natural trauma therapy, if you will, because in the normal healthy State, those dreams are associated with, and the inability to release epinephrine at night. So for me, what you just described first of all, it's the first time I've ever heard of it. But it ties together, something really quite
From the Sleep Neuroscience literature which is that when people are stressed, they tend to get less rapid eye movement, sleep that rapid eye movement. Sleep normally is associated with low levels of epinephrine, so whether or not it's causal or not isn't clear, but sort of, doesn't matter for sake of this discussion. But what I'm wondering and I suppose one could test for, but may be observed, is whether or not people who are over in overtraining too much over reaching too much because of this elevated, nocturnal epinephrine.
And diminished REM sleep whether or not their emotional state is also disrupted. Because one thing we know for sure is, if you want to disrupt somebody's emotional state, you deprive them of sleep and rapid eye movement, sleep in particular, the one caveat to that is for those of you out there that have heard that rapid eye movement sleep, deprivation, deliberate rapid eye, movement, sleep, deprivation,
Is a treatment for depression. That is true, but it's coupled with a next night enhanced rapid eye movement sleep. So one of the major takeaways from all of this that I'm realizing is that no surprise, daytime activities impact, nighttime, endocrine function, impact quality of sleep impact daytime
activities. Yeah. Actually there's there's so many fun things I want to do here now. This is actually why measuring eye movement is a very fantastic cool.
For understanding total stress load. And you can actually differentiate different types of stress. So, caffeine use versus alcohol, use versus sleep deprivation by actually measuring eye movements. And that's actually what we do in our absolute rest. Sleep company is in addition to getting a full P. SD sleep study done in your bedroom, you're going to get an eye tracking assessment, which we're gonna be able to figure out why you're getting there. So nonetheless. Yeah, if you actually look at the classic signs and symptoms of overtraining or overtraining,
Mmm. It's going to be everything from performance decrements. Like we talked about resting, heart rate is going to increase, you're going to see things like HRV, drop by generally 20 or so percent. That would be a very large disruption HRV, decrease body weight, and then all the stuff Andrew. You just talked about so motivation. Adherence appetite moved. All of this stuff at our are classically known, associations with with overtraining, and that's for the exact reason you're talking about sleep, too.
Urban system disruptions wanting to train motivation. All of this stuff goes part and parcel with non-functional overreaching and or overtraining you can actually tie this back in a little bit more to some other biomarkers in this is great because this is stuff. We look for this is the the physiology simply look for. You've probably talked about shbg before which is a sex hormone-binding globulin. So, this is the protein that that'll float in your body that's going to bind up.
Sex, hormones and particular testosterone. So what happens with overtraining is that you can actually take this seriously like week by week, and you'll actually see this number rise. And so if you see this, like say you're using a service like inside tracker and you're getting your, your blood measured every so often and you see this number start ticking up, this is actually associated with that because what's actually happening is is binding up all your free testosterone and that's just leading back to the circle. We're talking about and you can actually see the same thing happen with calorie restriction does.
Enough calories but in this particular case because it actually happens in both scenarios you know it's not an issue simply of being under calorie, it's clearly an issue of the training load being too high. So just to give another little tool, there's I can get the link for it but there's a website that was created by which Journal sleep in, but I'll get it to you. You can link it up where you can actually go in and plug in a number of values from blood chemistry. So if you got your blood work done,
And you can plug in your pre number and your post number. So, say, you got it done, and then maybe ten weeks later, you got it done again and you're wondering and you notice. Hey, my free testosterone is down or my shbg is up. Is it actually a meaningful number and you, it will actually tell you, whether or not, the change proposed, is physiologically Meaningful or not, or just within the error margin of the measure and you can actually change like, right there on the website. You can change your confidence interval. So it's really, really cool. If you know, if you just have your own blood
You want to know like, hey, I had any level this year and now it's here over there. It's a totally free resource created, gone through peer review, all that stuff, and I'll give you a link to that. So that's a pretty cool measure in addition to that, like probably one of the more powerful and easy metrics biologically is to take your cortisol and DHEA ratio. So this is known to be associated with a lot of things. You want to be really careful. You don't want this number to be too high or too low. Something like 0.09.
It is about
supporters at all. To DHEA
DCT, cortisol
ratio, DHEA to cortisol. I'd love to tell you. I said it backwards on purpose. Just to make sure everyone understood, but I got it
backwards. Yeah, I mean, this ratio has been associated with so many things you have to do, you do have to be careful with Association, right? Not being causation, but everything from risk of infections, the metabolic health and like other disease States, as well as more what we're talking about which is, Hey My, My get in
Sort of cortisol is regulation, which is what a lot of folks would call again, adrenal fatigue. And that's not really what's happening, but if adrenaline and epinephrine her off and testosterone and cortisol is going to be long, the riot and so you can also look at things like testosterone cortisone ratios. So there's a lot of things you can glean here to give you some insights into where you're going. If that if that ratio is too high, that's going to be associated with metabolic syndrome, and a bunch of other stuff. If it's too low,
That's going to be associated with a lot of cognitive problems like aggression and mood and a bunch of things like that. So again you want to keep it right around that 0.09 ratio and most of the time actually in some blood chemistry stuff, you'll get a you get a reporter that or you can calculate it pretty
quickly.
I'm sure we'll get into this in the episode that comes next on nutrition and supplementation. Totally.
What about compounds that lower cortisol? Such as ashwagandha, I can see. Now based on the logic, your spelling out that during phases of a lot of intense overreaching or frequent overreaching, given that those compounds can indeed. Lower cortisol weirdo, Lee Road olya, rosacea rhodiola rhodiola. Rosacea fun word to say two words, but the first one more fun to say rhodiola Road.
Geisha, rhodiola rosea, rhodiola rosea, folks, and ashwagandha. I've been trying rhodiola recently and mainly as a buffer to Output, it does seem to have some good data attached, to it related to lowering ones perceived threshold of how hard they're working. So in other words, you can work harder and not feel as if you're working really hard.
Which allows you to do more work. That's sort of the subjective description of how it works. But you told me that it can blunt cortisol and ashwagandha we know, blondes cortisol, both of these things, of course can do other things, but are these compounds that you sometimes will incorporate into a training regimen.
I would have been using rhodiola for probably six or more years, like pretty consistently, not personally, but using it with the individually work with the, you do need to be a little bit careful. I wouldn't say that it blunts cortisol. It is probably more purple.
Described as a cortisol modulator which means sort of if it's too high or too low it'll help kind of keep it within normative range. There's also there is important to note, there have been a handful of studies to of, I know specifically showed that rhodiola use going to hand strength gains. However, it may reduce muscular endurance. So we need more human data on this stuff, and it may turn out, that's not a concern. It may also turn
Be concerned. So nothing is nothing is perfect and free. There's no supplement. That is a Panacea. And I have used again, rhodiola in a lot of situations because they think he can have to pay attention. The cortisol is, is you how it's supposed to be modulated throughout the day. It's not supposed to be this normal. Now, in fact, if you look at normative values, it's typically described in micrograms per deciliter and depending on literally what company used to draw your blood. If you're
Get through the blood depending on what which method they use to analyze it. The normative values are like, frankly, embarrassingly all over the place, they're mostly going to be like five to 25 as a quote-unquote, normative value. But that's outrageous. We also know those numbers vary massively by age by sex and throughout the day and so if you only are taking a single point, this assume you're doing a fasted blood draw, which is what most folks do. It's really only going to
Tell you a lot about what's happening. In that moment we need to know well like maybe let's say my cortisol was if I'm a say 38 year-old woman and my 7 a.m. cortisol was 15 milligrams per deciliter, that's pretty good. But if it's 15 milligrams per deciliter at 3 p.m. whoo boy I'm in probably having some issues, right? So there's a change throughout the day and you need to be able to plot that curve. So you can actually pretty standard practice that we do. Is we look at court,
Has all throughout the day, we're going to take multiple markers because I don't want to see your Baseline cortisol. I want to see this curve throughout the day. That's going to tell me a ton about again, as you're sleeping caused. By this regulation, is it your training is a something else. So I would like take a single Baseline blood marker of cortisol with a lot of grain of salt. We typically measured at least three times throughout the day. So something like 6 to 9 a.m. 12:00 to 3:00 and then something like closer to the evening.
Oftentimes, we do much more will do like seven points or something like that throughout the day depending on the situation. So you want to be careful of that distance. We're here, you can also see cortisol in through saliva and now that's sort of pros and cons to that because the pro of doing it in, your blood is, it's it's much more stable saliva is extremely responsive to whatever happened. These seconds before you took that test. The upside of it though is you can do a bunch of real world.
Whole life experiments. So for example, we will do this sometimes if we want to see how an individual is responding to a given stressor, let's take it right. Let's take the taking them spinning with tube. We're going to take it and we're going to go do this workout or this cold exposure. We're going to do is take it at the end. We know that it's responsive to what just happened but that's the point. So you can actually there's sort of pros and cons so you'll use the appropriate measure for the appropriate question. You're trying to
answer a couple of points and Reflections about cortisol by first Laboratory.
Duty, as an undergraduate was in a specially in a biopsychology lab at the time, they didn't have the field of Neuroscience, as it's now called, it was called biopsychology, or psycho biology to know that. Now, there was using neurochemistry neurobiology, they'd all collapsed into what we got now, called Neuroscience, right arm, which is only through some years ago. But my job was to collect the cortisol samples, which means I was collecting, spit, which means I was collecting saliva, and that an advantage of saliva base korres all. It's free cortisol. It's the active form. Totally, you mentioned, it's reflective of what happened.
In the seconds or minutes, just prior a couple of things about the regular cortisol pattern across the day because I realized that while it would be wonderful for everybody to get their cortisol measured in detail multiple times and blood and and saliva and so, on some people just won't do that for whatever reason or can't do that. Yeah. The basic Contour of a healthy pattern of cortisol. Secretion is to have highest levels of cortisol. In the morning is actually part of the mechanism that's associated with waking. You up viewing, bright light. Ideally from
Light, but other forms of bright light early in the day actually can lead to a 50 percent 50 percent increase in that cortisol Spike, which is a good thing. People here, elevated cortisol, own only this sets in motion, a Cascade of things, relate to enhance mood and alertness immune system function Etc. What I think it can be useful for people to understand is that many things will Spike cortisol throughout the day, stress, cold water exercise. But the idea is that it comes down to baseline or near Baseline rather quickly, one of the worst situations as
You pointed out is when the highest level of cortisol is consistently shifted to the afternoon period. In fact, that's a pretty reliable signature of certain forms of depression. This is work by my colleague, David Spiegel at Stanford Psychiatry and the great Bob, sapolsky, Robert sapolsky of why zebras don't get ulcers. Yep. And behave at cetera and fame lots of lots of popular books there I think that if people are trying to regulate their cortisol and they're just under
They just understand that basic Contour that the Baseline should be, you know, rise, pretty quickly after one rises in the morning. So it's easy to remember, rise, rise. Rise out of bed and rise corozal with light bright light with exercise. With caffeine these things will all increase cortisol and then across the day, it's normal for cortisol to spike. But then to use some of the down-regulation methods that you described in particular, the breathing methods and exercise itself is the case may be. But then to really pay attention to how much
Psychological and physical stress is occurring in the six hours or so, or eight hours prior to sleep. Does that seem like a good tour broad Contour of how to have a healthy pattern of cortisol release because you actually want the cortisol to reduce inflammation and initiate or participate in the recovery. Process will not
see any progress from exercise training without a large spike in cortisol. It is critically important. When we think of phrases like cortisol inflammation, stress
This is not bad. Physiology is not personified right there are the things don't like hu in the body, right? It is all is not good and bad. They just are the more you try to suppress cortisol, the more you suppress adaptation, what you want is exactly what you mentioned. Large spikes, met with large quick recovery and you want to do that throughout the day and get that hormetic stressor. This is so going back to your ashwagandha and Rhodiola issue it, I think would be very short-sighted for people to do that as
Is a prophylactic because you if you blunt cortisol, you're going to cause them, you know,
suppressant especially early in the day, total taking ashwagandha before going to train as is
counterproductive. Yeah, we do not just, this is not a baseline part of our foundational package, right? If you go look at the athlete foundations or the athlete resilience protocols, so put together, you're not going to see these things in there for that specific reason. Any form of cortisol, regulation needs to be done strategically, if you are excessively High,
And we're bringing you back down to normative values at the right time than great. If you're normal though.
Then you taking you down lower than that is actually problematic. The same thing is actually true. Since we're here, for oxidative stress, for information antioxidant use we mentioned. I think earlier about taking vitamin C and vitamin E. Post exercise will actually blunt out of patience or at least has the potential to do. So same thing, right? If you're modulating this response, just because and you have not done so because of actually biological testing that indicated you need to do such
Then you actually may be making things worse. And so we see this constantly with people who take a number of
Supplements and substances for sleep and then they wake up the next morning groggy and near your cortisol suppressed. Okay, great. So then they take something for stimulation and then the rest of the day they're trying to reduce in the 1980s nasty cycle instead of just getting out of the way and letting cortisol do what it's supposed to do and then making sure again you're teaching it. So this is actually a coachable response, you can coach your own body.
To go down in the later, part of the day and go up in the earlier, part of the day. On the, you want to make sure that you are driving that train with intent. And so again, to reiterate, if you don't need that, you shouldn't do it. Right? If you don't need to lower cortisol, you shouldn't walk around doing it. You're just going to suppress the state even far. And this is what's neat. This is needed for anabolic. Responses are you're not going to grow muscle of cortisol is not spiked. It's going to compromise it rather. So you want to be intentional.
Well, with these practices, especially in the form of supplementation, be very, very
intentional.
I've heard it said that carbohydrates in particular, starchy carbohydrate definitely can inhibit cortisol, definitely. And this could be through the tryptophan, an amino acid related. Pathway that ratchets up to serotonin release, probably some other things, too. I mean, the idea that carbohydrate is just stimulate serotonin is a little bit overly simplistic
and PK going up and immediately turning out on there.
Yeah. Right.
So, you know, I think we've all experienced this, you know, we're stressed or stress. We doesn't necessarily even have to be highly processed, you know, fat associate, you know, fatty carbohydrates, you know, like potato chips and potato chips and dip or these kinds of things. It can also be polarizable, oatmeal, boil, pasta, which here I'm not trying to demonize carbohydrates. I do ingest carbohydrates minimally or not processed carbohydrates, most of the time but not all the time.
And they have a fairly potent effect on lowering stress and perceived stress and even quality of sleep, which is not to say that somebody has to load up on them like crazy. Unless they're glycogen is really depleted. Talked a lot about this in the endurance episode. I know we'll touch on it more in the nutrition supplementation episode. But in thinking about the relationship between carbohydrates and cortisol and what, we've just been talking about in terms of cortisol as being vitally important for the
Adaptation Trigger or triggering adaptation, probably better way to put it, but that it can blunt cortisol
taken post training
or maybe in the evening before sleep, what are some of the basic ways that one can think about? And maybe use carbohydrates in specific ways in order to let's say, control of cortisol rather than quash
cortisol, you actually have alluded to it a number of times already, so we oftentimes will give
People a lot of carbohydrates at night, for some of these reasons, you're going to feel fantastic, a lot of people, it helps you sleep, both get to sleep and stay asleep some quality you talked about specifically, remember, think about it this way. Cortisol at its core is an energy signaling molecule. It says, we are in the need for energy.
Great epinephrine is the same way you you'll start seeing. For example, cortisol will liberate free fatty acids, put them in the bloodstream, get you prepared to do something. The problem is, if it's continually elevated throughout the day with no down-regulation, we start running into issues, right? So again, this is the differentiation between, oh, my cortisol is slightly elevated all day versus, I had a really big, big spike after training. I had a really big spike after a breath protocol cetera and then it went back down. So that being said,
If you then ingest carbohydrates, you are tell it is quick to see the signal, all we have nutrients, we have energy again, specifically carbohydrates. Therefore, cortisol can sort of go back down. We don't need to be liberating free fatty acids and preparing the in for fuel, so you can help yourself. Go to sleep. For many, as you pointed out, many mechanisms, actually, why carbohydrates will help you sleep at night for some, not all people, but some, that would be one of the relationships that has with
cortisol, great. I look forward to hearing more about how the various macronutrients, and
The micronutrients and so-called adaptogens this very mysterious group. Yeah yeah. Compounds. The other word adaptogen gets thrown around so much it is. But as long as we're talking about adaptation, I think that'll be fair play for the discussion in the next episode about nutrition and supplementation. In my laboratory. When we study stress, we use a number of different markers. Subjective reports of how stress people feel heart, rate morning, heart rate, heart rate, variability,
Cortisol, free cortisol and on and on what are some of the other markers of stress as it relates to exercise adaptations and Recovery. Because once again, I think we're seeing a lot of parallels between the study of psychological stress and the study of physical stress as it relates to exercise adaptation. Remember
in terms of physiology stress is stress, this is why we have this cool term of allostatic load or all the spaces so it's that it really doesn't matter which
system you test for it will reflect overall, stress, you mentioned several of them. We've got done talking about some biomarkers HRV and heart rate are another great example because what you're trying to do is this when we were talking about the muscle soreness thing, but we were really getting at was a marker of how do I fix the overuse in that particular muscle. Now, we've really transitioned into Global markers of overuse, and why these are problematic.
Or important to pay attention. To rather is again, these are the indicators that needn't just work a muscle out too hard. But you have actually done something where you've compromised, all of your physiology to a level where you've influenced a circulating catecholamine or something. That's going to influence multiple markers. Now, like your sleep and your mood, and your behavior. So that's why these things are problematic. That said you could look at resting, heart rate, not a bad thing to do. However, that does have multiple. Downsides. One thing we do know is
Your resting heart rate will Elevate with excessive stress load. This actually doesn't matter if it is physical stress or psychological stress or a combination. So you will see that number drift up over time. Here's the downside though, it's not tremendously sensitive to smaller stressors. In other words, if you were to do something, like alcohol is a very good example. You will see your resting heart rate elevated with alcohol. Use excessive tobacco, use and psychological stress. However, if you do something smaller like hard training,
Options resting, heart rates, not sensitive enough to pick that up. It will actually probably stay the same. So for those reasons, we don't actually use resting heart rate that much, we will take it, but it's not our primary indicator. That being said, HRV is a better use. So just where the quickly for those that are not familiar, your heart rate. Let's say, for example, you your resting heart rate is 60 beats per minute. That means every second and speeding, it doesn't actually happen on a consistent Rhythm such that it would be tan. Second one be done second to be done. S 3, Etc.
Rate is more variable. So in Michael beat,
Beat beat beat beat beat, there's a variation in the heart rate and at the end of that 60 seconds in this example, you would have still completed 60 beats they just aren't on the exact same pattern. Well, one thing that's actually quite interesting is the amount of variation in your heart rate is actually associated with your overall sympathetic or parasympathetic State such that a large variation. So in a rhythmic pattern is generally more representative of being more rested and recovered and being
or parasympathetic a, you'll notice. During times of extremely high stress, you will be very rhythmic, beat beat beat, beat beat. And so this is a little bit of a confusing idea, but a high HRV is they're indicated of a lot of variation. Meaning you're pretty recovered a low HRV. Meaning there's not a lot of variation means you're probably pretty stressed and wire, so it's related to her aid. But in my opinion it is a
Significantly better marker of that. Now one thing you want to pay attention to, if you do this, a couple of things, there are some accuracy issues with many of the devices. Basically, everybody at this point, probably has some device that's telling them their HRV. What you do not want to do is simply compare your number to somebody else. For a lot of reasons. Not all of these Technologies are actually even measuring the same thing again. Some of them are actually combining with other metrics and calling it. Your
All Readiness or your recovery. And so now we've what we've actually done is made a couple of assumptions and then stack them on a whole host of other assumptions and then giving you a number and you don't know what that sort of black box score actually even represent. So I would caution one against taking too much information from that if you are actually measuring HRV, even within that, there's a loss of ways to calculate it that are not important here. So don't necessarily worry about the score.
And I'm come compare it to yourself but not to others. What you will see is if you use similar devices and techniques
He is hard to find data here but in general, people, that are overweight might have a little bit of a lower score as in a worst score, we need more information on that to be clear. So in large part the best way to use something like HRV is to measure it under the exact same circumstances every day. So whether you're going to use just a device on your watch, or your phone or your bed, or anything else, or are you going to buy a special HRV under it's fine.
Just take that measure at the same time. Mostly this means first thing in the morning. So you wake up, you go to the bathroom, you come back down and take your measure, something like that. You don't wait, sometimes you took it before food, then after your look at your phone, like all these other things that can influence dress. So, so take it. It usually take somewhere between S 2 minutes to record. So you want to pay attention to that. Now, one of the things you'll notice is there is a natural change in your HRV that just happens. So what you kind of really want to pay attention to is I guess answering the question of how
How much of a change in HRV has to happen before I should care, and it's hard to answer, right? So let's just say, your HRV was 100. I just made that number. What if you wake up tomorrow? It's 99. What's that mean? Well, I don't know if you wake up tomorrow and it's 20, that's probably a bad thing. Well, where's that line? It's hard. One thing I would recommend doing is taking your HRV for at least a month.
Before you start using that value to make any changes
and you recommend taking it first thing in the morning. Yep, always roughly the same
time. Basically under the same circumstances, it doesn't have to be technically the morning, but because your day will change on most days when you get into, that's the most stable thing in your life. So I would take it then and I would collect it for at least a day, at least a month, rather, maybe even six weeks and then give yourself basically a running average. So, what we quite honestly do is we will actually track
Check it for forever. And then what we always look at is, what does it look like today? Relative to the last week on average? And then, what does that look like to our historical average? And we always compare those things and you also want to make sure you compare like to like so, in other words, I generally will not going to worry about today's HRV. Score relative to tomorrow's what I want to look at is today's relative to this exact same day last week.
Not for athletes, but for non-athletes this is very important. So imagine don't worry about the difference between HRV score on Monday. Compared to Tuesday, pay attention to Monday compared to last Monday, and the Monday before that. That's because you typically have the same sort of weekly schedule and what you don't want to do is say, look at Monday's HRV score, which is a reflection of what happens Sunday and compare that to Tuesday's, which is actually a reflection of what happened Monday, you probably didn't do the same stressors on
Today is Monday, so you're not actually comparing the same thing. But if you have a General weekly schedule, you would likely to compare this. Monday's led to the last Monday's, because they're both comparing what happened on the previous day, sir. So, that sort of Distinction makes sense. Absolutely, I do the same thing with body weight. By the way, if you're trying to track body mass gain or fat loss or something compare, like the like you can look at the daily changes, but you need to pay attention to what that normal distribution is. So if you kind of do that, you know, Monday to Monday thing, that'll give you a rough area of saying. Okay, mine,
Normal weekly variation is say 5, so my average is 100, but I will fluctuate between 95 to 105. That's my standard deviation is sort of a science dorks would call that if you start Barry changing more than 5% outside of your normal standard deviation, then I'm going to start paying attention a little bit and I'm going to actually run a little bit of an algorithm on this one. And so here is my thinking process when I get HIV, really any metric but HRV is is example. We're using
First up, did I collect good data? And what a dad? I mean, again, did I measure the same way? I measured every single day, or did I get up and look at my phone first, and I realize, oh crap, I forgot to take my HRV. And then, I went back and got there. So, say I had a 15% derivation from my normal number and then I realized, oh yeah, that's right. I was up super late last night doing whatever. Okay, great. I'm going to consider that bad data. You didn't go.
It was bad day, then I'm not doing anything. Ignore and bad data. You throw it out. You don't use it. If you decide for the most part, let's assume it was good data. Okay, great. Then I'm going on to my next question, which is, is it a cute? In other words, is it just today, right? Or is it chronic as was this is it, is this pattern been happening for more than five days? Or at least three of the last four, something like that? Three minimum is what I like honestly, I General look at five or more days. That's a very big distinction. If
It is something that just happened today. And the next question I'm going to ask myself is and I am that adaptation phase. Am I trying to be in a phase where I'm trying to cause an insult to the body that it needs to respond with. If that is the case, I'm just going to ignore it, right? In fact it's almost sometimes a good sign. Hey, we are stressing the body and it is stressed. What we're doing is working amazing. In fact, if you don't see that as sort of like mmmm, maybe we're not do enough to push the face. All right. Sorry.
If the answer is no, we're in a peaking phase. Then we're actually going to use what I call a cute State shifters. So this is a whole host of little tricks that I have that can change HRV or any recovery metric within seconds.
Again, these are not chronic fixes. This is just, I'm having a bad day today. I feel like crap, can I make myself feel better right now? And so I kind of call these parlor tricks. A lot of the times and there's a thousand of them. We are certainly not going to go over them, but I'll give you some examples. You can pull out. First of all, physical movement will do it, you be stunned. I was just doing some yoga moving around. Doing some jumping jacks. Starting your work out. I mean, you've probably
this is sort of cliche in our world this point, but if you ever do any serious lifting over a serious amount of time, there will be days when which you walk in the gym, and you feel awful and somehow that day, you said a lifetime PR.
Yeah, that's a strange strange phenomena. Yeah, I experience that more than a few times, it's rare. The inverse is rare. However, you feel great. You have a horrible work out. It happens. Yeah, and it.
Open for any number of different reasons. But yeah, I think the former when one isn't feeling very good and then somehow it has a terrific work out. Does set a kind of a seed of Doubt as to how good our subjective assessments really are, which I guess is why we're talking about objective assessments. Yep, like HIV. And remember if it's
a single day, here you can even do hard training. People sort of have this idea, like, well, if you get up in your recovery scores down, do a lighter day.
That's probably not like an probably never making that choice to be honest. Not in this situation. Remember, this is one bad day and we are in a phase of even trying to improve performance right now. Like we're probably still training hard. You will again often. See I felt terrible when I trained super hard and it totally changed my day around. This is all can happen. So exercise is my first love here. Absolutely breathing any sort of upregulation breathing. So we talked a lot about down-regulation breathing, just do the
Opposite. Right? And so this is one hyperventilation strategies can work. Instead of accentuating the exhale you accentuate, the inhale or you restrict the exhales. This is working on the exact opposite situation. You can also play little this is where things like music motivational quotes. If you're the type that follows people on Instagram that motivates you or can work with these things coaching tactics, these can be things like
Finding out are talking about that person's why you sort of shared something that a mantra you use. When you're training hard to keep, you go better. I'm not going to ask you to share that now but some people have this sometimes, right? Or you may have this conversation with your app, then we call this finding out your why, right? So finding out like, why are you really here? What are we doing here? And a lot of times, you'll hear things like
It's because I grew up poor and I don't ever want to be poor again. Okay. Great. Well this is for my children or like any number of things and you can pull that out on these days you need to be really careful. This is why I call these parlor tricks because when you play that card too, often it starts to lose effect, right? And you can only dig to a whole. So often before it's sort of like the same thing as with music, right? If you every time you go to the weight room, it's blasting death metal at level 10, will eventually. It's not it's no longer motivating, right? It's no longer.
Other helpful. So you want to deploy these things
strategic? Yeah, the the phrase it comes to mind is signal-to-noise, you know, the nervous system especially the dopamine system and the adrenaline system, which are part of this larger system called the catecholamine systems, that is dopamine epinephrine norepinephrine. The get-up-and-go focus on external goals movement Associated. It's and on, and on that, that system responds best to high signal relative to noise. So if you're, as you point out, listen to music.
Time drinking a ton of caffeine energy, drinks, pre-workout nootropics and then you know stacking all those things sometimes refer this is dopamine stacking informally referred to as dopamine sake. You're doing all those things and then your first of all, then you're wondering why I later that afternoon or the next day you're feeling like you're under a cloud. It was obvious, you're kind of cooling system crashed but it's also that you don't necessarily become dependent on. It is just that you start to wonder whether or not you have the internal.
Oh, mechanisms and motivation to train without those things. And so one tends to use them more and more, and then they have a diminishing effect over time. The rule that I've been sort of applying has been, I never do two workouts in a row, or I'm stacking in stimulants loud music and any kind of sort of high potency inspiration. However, every set in the gym or when I run, I really try and be diligent about form and attention to what I'm doing. The one exception would be the long duration endurance.
Part of the reason I do that work is to let my mind. Go into states of drifting, not trying to think in complete sentences or even close to it. Just let my brain kind of idle at a low hum and for that reason, generally listen to something that's up more of a story or don't listen to anything at all and just let my thoughts kind of spool through anyway, I don't want to take us too far off track, but I think this idea of signal the noise will resonate with the engineers out there. But since most people are likely not engineers
is it is the way that the nervous system works evidenced by the fact that whatever area of your body right now is in contact with a chair or any other surface that's been in contact with for more than a few seconds. You forget that it's in contact with it because there's low signal the noise at that point a
similar note, you actually mentioned stimulants. Basically there, whether you're talking caffeine or any other, stimulant any other cortisol modulators or adaptogens, any of these things fall in the category, if you're not using them consistently and you're having a rough day and also you throw down
200 milligrams of caffeine. It's going to change real fast. Me. That's a
strong performance enhancing
effect. Yeah, absolutely. And for these reasons, right? So we mentioned a couple of them breathwork food more calories, just eating some food. Sometimes we'll give people like what we call Comfort Foods. So this is just like, hey you're you know, you're from Georgia and we know you love grits. So we're having grits for breakfast. Oh, my great! Like this! Something to change your mood acute State. Shifters
To alter it. The other couple of Tricks here are light. So, if we know that maybe see, multiple people are struggling that day, maybe we'll put on the lights, extra bright will bring in some extra things and just get it more light in there and not, then even count actually going outside and seeing the Sun. But perhaps, we'll do that. And then other little tricks that I've learned over the years is one particular thing. I love is literally drawing a line, a physical line in the ground and you look at that line and you say like I'm going to train today and I'm going to accomplish
This effort I'm not going to walk past this line and into that training space until I'm ready to give that effort. And that may take a minute or 10 or whatever but it's the physical barrier is very important to saying like I'm not just going to get through it. I'm going to actually perform the way I want to perform or I'm not going to do it and I'm not going to cross this line and so I'm ready to make that
happen. I really like that tool. It also brings to mind the importance of
At least thinking about how your relationship with your phone during training can perhaps help but also impede workout, motivation and performance. In an earlier episode, you mentioned that if people are using their phone to play music during their workout, that they establish the complete playlist, prior to initiating the workout and then not deviate from that playlist as opposed to changing it in the middle, because there's just too much of a, of an Impulse to also check social media.
Email, check text messages. I mean the way I think about the phone actually is, it's a bunch of little brain areas. It's got a memory system for you. It's got look-up tables for a look-up tables. It's got websites to look things up on the Internet. It's got photos. I mean, it is so rich with sensory data and it's so closely linked to our own brain architecture. That algorithms are designed for those to be that way that I always think about it as bringing in a second person with me. But that person is my twin.
That has severe attention issues and for those that already have attention issues. Just think about this as a twin, that would then compound You by tapping on your shoulder, talking to you all the time interrupting you. Somebody that you like a lot, but that frankly is is a little bit irritating in that they're interrupting your ability to really show up and also your ability to show up for them. So I started to think about the phone as entire individual and that it represents me and certainly not the
Version of
me. Great, exactly. You actually mentioned something else that will use occasionally, which what we call Brain Games or puzzles. Whether this is a crossword puzzle or something, where you actually lose your thought of self for a second and your brain gets engaged in a task that you weren't regretting, or even thinking about, these can be stupid little games. It could be little challenges, especially if you're like a group or a team setting, all right? Like we're going to play one round of dodgeball or we're going to play one round of Thumb Wars. So
You do encourage this. Yeah I see. So you would play like a thing instead of warming up like all right, get in there, we'll get going. Where do you know? Get your foam roller your diamond. Whatever thing is is like all right, everyone line up, and we're going to play thumb Roars to see who wins, right? Just like whatever right now. Listen, you've snapped into a new shift or literally playing brain games playing Tetris on your phone. Like any of these things can work in this acute setting,
can I ask you a question? It's not directly related to recovery per se but I think it's worth
Mentioning or asking about rather, which is the use of mirrors are no mirrors, while training, you know, the experience of seeing oneself and observing ones form in the mirror, I suppose has some utility. You can get some sense of progress that you might trigger. You're almost specifically, referring to resistance training, I suppose. It could be cardio if you're running on a treadmill or pushing a sled or something, but you can see form, you can get a sense of what your face looks like. When
Grimace but in all seriousness you are without question a person not you Andy, but one is in a less interoceptive mode when looking at themselves in the mirror so extra reception perception of things beyond the confines of our skin. Even if it's a picture of us interoception perception of everything from the skin Inward. And so if we're looking at ourselves, we're diverting some allocation of our attention. Let's say there's
Hundred, these are arbitrary units and you can put 50% of your attention on the feeling in your body or the muscles, your training and 50% on how it appears in the mirror or it could be a hundred percent on the mirror. 100% internally, which you best accomplished probably by closing your eyes. So obviously there are constraints here, certain movements, you wouldn't want to close your eyes, Etc, in general, what are your thoughts on mirrors? Are no mirrors, for resistance, training, specifically.
It depends on the metric that you find most important. And what I mean by this is, if
If you're training for same muscle hypertrophy, there's emerging evidence that suggests actually looking at yourself in the mirror and even flexing in between sets, can actually be advantageous or can augment muscle
gains. Oh my there's support for all the the mirror. Flexors, absolutely not. Not making fun of you. I just is sort of interesting to be on the observing side of that but Hey, listen results are what people are
after. Yeah, having said that if you're trying to enhance
Movement learning, then it may be detrimental. So if you're doing an exercise that is explosive and fast, it's probably not the best thing to be looking into a mirror. If you were to walk into any Olympic weightlifting Arena and you'd had any thoughts of using a mirror, you would probably run out of the gym, very, very quickly. You can't see yourself in time to make an adjustment with a movement that's happening that fast. And also will do exactly what you mentioned, which is it will remove your ability to
First and and feel the movement. And so this is a big component to using technology for exercise. Adam all is you have to make sure that the end point is you understanding you and your physiology more not less when you Outsource learning to technology and in this case, even if the technology is the mirror, you remove your ability to gain and truly understand that learning process. So you need to be very very careful whether you using them.
Or whether you using any number of apps, where you can record say a movement and then watch it afterwards and it will give you a breakdown. If your hand was in the right spot or if it was the right spot, these are all great. But you need to, then take the next step which is to say, I need to be able to feel that position, all right? So in the case of performance, if you can imagine trying to learn a new technique, say running technique and you have to be able to watch yourself in the mirror to understand your stride and right position if you don't take the next step of saying, okay, now I
I don't have to look in the mirror and I can feel what I'm getting out of rhythm or whatever the case is, then you'll never be able to actually then use that in your race. And so it's very, very important to people. Again, pay attention to what is the dependent variable that you're actually interested in doing? If you're trying to get better at something, the tech is okay, is a starting place. It just cannot be the finishing place.
Thank you for those Reflections. I'm curious as to what happens or what one should do, if their HRV is reduced for maybe three or four or more days in a row.
Next question that I'm going to ask is in am I in that adaptation phase? If so I'm going to still ignore it just like I did if it was a single bad day but I'm going to start watching it very carefully. I may actually now introduce some other tests so I may use a performance test. May look at something else, maybe ask questions, maybe have some communication either with myself or somebody else. So I'm gonna start paying more attention but I'm still really not going to take much action until that crosses.
More than seven days of consistent problems. If it does do that, or we're in a peaking phase, then I'm going to go to another set of solutions that are truly going to pull me out of the whole rather than just be those acute State. Shifters these are more what I call chronic say shifters. Now some of these are actually very similar to the ones we've used before, for example, thermal stress. So I can promise you, if your recovery score is in the
Eggs and you walk outside and you jump in your 35-degree water and you get back out. What's going to happen is your HRV, score immediately afterwards. I'm talking within seconds is going to be significantly compromised, right? In other words, think about that rumor. A low HRV means a high sympathetic. I promise you, cold water will put you in a high sympathetic Drive however and we've tested this pretty extensively looking at HRV, 01536.
E90, all the way up to 180 minutes post, and on average. You will see your HRV score. Continue to rise after that. And so well, you have this immediate sympathetic response, you will immediately then respond, you know, about 30 minutes on most. People depends on the person though. And that score will be improved for several hours afterwards. So heat can kind of have a similar effect that actually, again, is a it's sort of an acute.
Fix. But over time as we've described earlier, I can also have a little bit of a chronic effect. We can also then get into areas like sleep and so now we're going to start playing and exploring why are you sleeping poor as well or was your sleep score? Fine but your HRV was low. That's a little bit of a different answer if your sleep is getting compromised. So we're going to start going into and making sure we're improving our sleep in terms of like brain stuff.
Instead of maybe playing a game or having music or some of those other tricks, those aren't going to really have a chronic effect, but you can do things like work on social connection. That's actually been shown to improve recovery over time. You can do things like journaling or meditation and those have an acute effect as well as a chronic effects. So again, if you go Journal right now, you probably feel better. But also we know that over time that will gradually improve things so adaptogen.
And things like that. Also can have a, chronic effect. So can things like electrolytes or food or hydration if those things were off? So we're going to go to a whole number of areas, but those are the primary ones outstanding of all, that, of course, it may be simply a time to go back and reassess, our training program. That's truly the case. So that's where we're at. If so, we're probably going to either completely remove training or drop it to like fifty percent or so until
Till we start rebounding back to Baseline and that's generally the numbers we use
for many people who are not training for a competitive Sport. And maybe aren't pushing themselves really hard, you know, maybe there they consider themselves, someone who exercises in order to maintain health and Aesthetics and Longevity, Etc.
And they never really finish any workout completely exhausted.
They're sleeping? Okay, their appetites. Okay. Can we assume that they are recovering? Well, or maybe they're not creating enough of a adaptation response, like there's no Progressive overreaching and so there's really no stimulus for Recovery. What I'm saying here is on the face of it, I think is obvious, right? If you don't train hard, there's nothing to recover from what I'm really saying is
Is the ability to recover itself something that we need to train. In other words, can we get better at recovering? And the analogy here would be something like focus in order to perform work of any kind. But certainly mental work and physical work. We need to be able to focus. The ability to focus is the reflection of a bunch of neural circuits and chemicals and hormones, Etc. But we know roughly, what those are and we know that if you are
We're at focusing for every small bit of time that you can focus a little bit longer even if it's a matter of seconds, those circuits themselves get better at focusing and so on and so forth. So in other words is the recovery system. However, broad, neurotransmitters hormones, neural muscular immune based Etc. Can that system or set of systems become better? Can we get better at recovering? Can we meaning, can it become faster and more effective? Can we think of the
Every system is kind of a blade that gets sharper by engaging recovery. Because if so, then there's strong reason for people who are not pushing really hard to push, at least a little bit harder than is comfortable for them. Every once in a while, to make sure that that system doesn't start to slide
back. Remember, physiology is listening to everything you do and it is always responding. So the analogy that I will meet your analogy. With that, I use here is the bowling alley. So you've probably been bowling before
You've used the bumper Lanes, right
bumper Lanes? I've gone bowling before and I've spent time in the gutter and I've spent time on the pins. Okay? So been a while, we used to have a bowling alley in the town where I went to and as fun ways to slide around on those shoes and like it all the kids would hang out there and I feel like do they still have bowling alleys, I don't even know if feels like I don't think that may have gone the way of the
mid-2000s I don't care. No one bills anymore you're not going to ruin my good analogy.
Okay. Well what my intent was not to ruin your analogy.
Okay, tell us about bowling. All the bowlers are going to come after me with bowling balls, rolling gears and get
blasted was the all the stats on elevations and don't hurt me. So if one were to go bowling and they didn't want to put their ball in the gutter, yeah, you could put these little bumpers in those Lanes, all right? And these little foam pads that go in the gutter that if your ball is going towards the gutter, hits those and bounces off and goes back in the lane, right? Okay. So in this entire conversation, this is actually true of a lot of the way people approach their fitness and health,
People are very concerned oftentimes with optimizing meaning. I want to make sure I don't go in the gutter, I don't want to hit the walls. So therefore I'm going to try to improve the accuracy in which I throw the ball. So I want to make sure that I'm throwing it down the center of the lane more often. And I want to get my disc. My standard deviation Tighter and Tighter so that I don't get anywhere close to hitting the wall.
However, what they're not realizing is, if you do that, the body will start. Shrinking the size of the lane because what it basically says is uh we haven't had a ball touch Us in years. We don't need to be this wide. Let's get smaller and smaller and smaller. So it's not that you actually are having a reduced ability to recover but you start becoming incredibly sensitive to that
So your two strategies for enhancing recovery are to practice, getting closer, throwing that ball down the middle lane or to widen.
To widen the alley, and that's exactly what you're referring to and you absolutely should do that. And so what happens is, you don't have to be so precise with what you're doing because your ability to handle so many things is widened. So, if you're off now, by 45 inches to the right, no problem because you've just tripled the size of your alley. That's exactly what you want to do. So, paying attention to two things. Number one is getting better at accuracy, maybe staying really tight with your progressions using
And sleep to optimize your recovery and push. Your resilience is what we call this. In fact, there's actually a biological way to measure resilience, we do that in all of our folks. This is scientifically validated stuff. I didn't just make it up. You can actually measure resilience and there's more and more coming out on this, but that's exactly what that term means. So how, well can you handle and bang things off this Russell? So when you see a reduction in say 10% of your HRV today for you that might make you feel terrible for me.
Me, I might not feel anything because I'm well adapted to large fluctuations and therefore I'm okay. The less unless you do that the more and more responsive you will be to those slight deviations. So that is exactly the target. That's kind of what I allude to and I say you got to understand what are we optimizing for? We optimizing for making sure. I don't feel any different today. We optimizing to make sure when I do feel different, I still am able to perform. So this is why you want to do things like
maybe use some caffeine today and feel great. But if I have to use it every day, all I'm doing is shrinking my sensitivity there. So now, if I have to go a day without it, I can't train it. All right, caffeine is the easy example because people understand how that whole system works, but this is really true of everything else. So yeah, you need to practice this and the way to do that is to give yourself more stress.
To continue bringing the stress from nutrition from training from breathwork. You mentioned earlier about Focus the exact same thing, right? It's not just about getting better right now, it's about training a system and you can clearly train that. Right. We will often say, breathwork is a practice. That's exactly what we're talking about, right? So you're practicing getting better at these things. You're practicing or turning your focus. You're practicing recovering and quite literally
Logically, you can up regulate whether we're talking enzymes, whether we're talking about Regulators, these will be upregulated. So than the dime the next time that insult comes in. It's not as big as sign as damaging, so yeah, absolutely you can and you should strive for
that throughout all the episodes where we've been talking about exercise at the core of that is this word adaptations and I love that. You mentioned that breath work.
Can also create adaptations the way I'm visualizing all of this now. Is that?
Resistance training with weights machines body weight. Otherwise,
Cardiovascular training, running jogging, sprinting jumping and so on, thermal training, exposure to heat, exposure to cold in the dedicated way and deliberate respiration. Make a breathing or breath work, as a practice, all of those can be viewed as ways to trigger at applications. And in the context of recovery, the specific adaptations, you're trying to engage our opposite to stress. In fact, with the exception of
perhaps deliberate, cold exposure, may be deliberate heat exposure because if the sauna is really hot, you can get the dine orphan release, which is kind of uncomfortable but still in both those cases the rebound from that. In other words when you get out you shower or go to bed, the next morning, you do have this kind of blissed-out feeling. We know why that is, that is the rebound to that uncomfortable situation. So, it seems, it doesn't really matter whether or not you're using resistance, you're doing cardiovascular training.
Using thermal approaches or you're using respiration based approaches. All of these are really ways of both triggering adaptations and if applied properly to actually help you recover from the stress and create the literal result that you're trying to achieve, for some people that might have been obvious. But I think for many people, including myself, this set of conversations that we've been having over the series,
These episodes. It's really the first time that I've ever thought about exercise in these ways in any event is just a reflection but it's one that at least for me is tremendously useful because it has a lot of organizational logic to it, which at least appeals to my brain because the more that things have a logic, the more for me that they become simplified in the more that the vast array of tools becomes becomes visible to me, as you said earlier, what is it? Let me make sure I get this right. It's concepts are a few methods,
Kids are many pretty clothes okay, how would you put behind us? How you state it
methods are many concepts are
few, okay. Either way the directionality, probably that it doesn't know, let's keep it right? The methods are many concepts are few gal Pals law in science. You're not allowed to name things after yourself, but you can him thinks after other people. So it's a Galpin slaw
because I'm definitely the one who created that idea.
Absolutely.
That was extreme and tremendous sarcasm. Just so we're all.
Right regardless, here we go. Got galvan's law, the I go
one thing that's in my head right now is we've thrown out a lot of options for folks and maybe what we can do is try to simplify a little bit. So what I can kind of walk you through, is how we measure recovery, if you will on how often and some tools. And what I would recommend people do is not use everything. I said you want to pick one or two things per category that are most important.
Oughtn't to you, that are at your cost that are at your availability that are interesting and important relevant to you and do that. The reason I kind of wanted to cover a large number of things was to give them a Volks options. But again, I want to emphasize. The point is to not measure all of them. In fact, you don't need to. We I've ran this before with professional athletes, where we've taken blood urine every single day. We've done performance measures vertical jumps on a force plate.
One, two things every day for years on end and what I can tell you is there is tremendous redundancy in physiology right, Everything is Everything. So you don't need to do them and don't feel like you're missing out if you aren't doing them one or two metrics is probably fine. I generally recommend one subjective measure. This could be as simple as what's your mood, how do you feel today? Great, and one objective measure HRV, resting, heart rate, anything else?
Right? So if you even literally just did that, you'd probably have pretty good insight as to what you're doing. So maybe in fact, I'll go more detail here. Maybe I'll give you a couple of examples of things to measure every day. Some things that you should measure and maybe one quarterly monthly and then maybe even in some annually and then you can maybe just pick a couple from each of these categories and have yourself a pretty good monitoring system for what to do, and I'll include some that are a little bit of technology-based and then others that are totally cost.
In require nothing. Okay to start off. I would recommend taking something like HRV every day or most days if you don't have a device like that, you could also use. Honestly the CO2 tolerance test. And we've talked about that a number of times and we probably are plenty of research to go find that but that doesn't require anything. It typically takes about a minute or so and you can do that under the same circumstances in which HRV. In other words, do it the same time every day have the same standardization stuff. And that is actually been in our
Coaching experience while admittedly there's no peer-reviewed research on this yet. Just in our experience is tends to track extremely closely with HRV and other metrics of recovery. In fact, we actually did do a pilot trial in my lab and it attract decently well with both state and trade anxiety. So it's an isometric, I'm not perfect, but you could take that. So if you wanted, you could do both. But again, remember you're trying to capture.
Stress. And so, you're really just showing your measuring one thing two ways. So you don't necessarily have to have them both. I will do both just because like, I'm super interested in small differences but globally. They're going to tell you basically the same thing. So, those are two things we use again, basically, daily year-round or or close to it. If you want to go past that a little bit and you can look at, you can use it actually a pretty old commonly used survey called a dalda.
The da LDA, I forget the exact acronym, but it is a fairly lengthy questionnaire and it accounts for things like, how do you feel today? How did you sleep any stressors going on in life? How you been eating? And it's this is like, fairly comprehensive lengthy survey that came out. I mean, Jesus probably been around for 30 years or something is, it's nothing new and been used extensively. I, you would not want to do that every day. If you wanted to take some subjective measures every day, we typically stick,
Like I said, mood motivation, something like that you would you can perform this doll to test do something more like monthly or at the end of each training phase you know every couple of months and probably worth looking at. It's not going to tell you if you're in a bad spot today or tomorrow but you would pick that up with the HRV or suit autonomous does. It would though tell you information especially if you're working with another individual about major life changes and if anything it just facilitates that conversation, right? I noticed you were poor
it X happening. Let's let's talk about that and kind of help cetera. So another kind of sneaky helpful, one is this is simply body fat. Like I said, non-functional overreaching and overtraining are associated with the number of things like energy appetite suppression changes in in body weight or body composition. So you can measure that monthly or even really quarterly depending on what kind of athlete or individual you working at or if you're trying to especially if you're not trying to
Waiter if you're trying to be at maintenance and that'll give you some insights as well. So moving past that now, actually, we're going to move into the realm of things that we call Hidden stressors. So those are, those are all visible stressors. So hidden stressors, the most common ones we've sort of mentioned and I would probably do this. You, well, you don't have to lose one's through serum. So this is bloodwork cortisol. Like we talked about and testosterone and then of course, testosterone cortisone ratio and then the other ones I mentioned, you can do those quarterly. It's not bad.
There are some blood markers that there's really no sense to do them that soon. And there are other markers. I mean, in our system are, individuals are getting pretty, extensive blood work saliva, work, urine and stool, and there's so there's plenty of those things you just do not need to measure, you know, every 10 weeks or so. In this case, you know, cortisol, as you know, sort of changes rapidly testosterone can change pretty quickly. But if you're really trying to notice a large Trend, certainly
Quarterly or so is is an appropriate time frame. Doing it every four or five weeks, probably unnecessary. So you can save yourself some money and do that other stuff. You can look at actually more like, semi-annually in plasma, like, glutamine and glutamine to glutamate ratio. And you can, maybe save the why you want to look at those for another conversation. But those are important. And we always look at something from the oxidative stress things. So this could be something like tnf-alpha or interleukin 6, something like that. Again we're looking at that in serum, we're looking at that.
That, you know, like semi-annually and then another sneaky actually one that I love to look at is the neutrophil, the lymphocyte ratio, which gives some pretty good insight. And again, you could look at that, like, fairly quarterly. If that number starts to get really high, certainly like more than nine to one. You got a pretty good Insight, that something gnarly is going on with your immune system. So we will actually take action, much lower than that number, but that's like a nice cut off. You'll see is like that's a very, very high number. So those are some things you can use. Most folks have
Ability. Hopefully to get some basic blood work done, get a basic, what's called a CBC and CMP. If you have a great physician and you can get insurance to cover that, and you just go on and ask for a CBC and CMP. They'll know what that means. You can Google that and the order it, you'll get all the information typically that I just described or close enough and you'll get some insights and then you can, you can just use that free service. I mentioned earlier to check to see whether or not, the changes are just a matter of testing quality or actually physiologically relevant
what you just.
Described is an amazingly powerful array of tools. I'm hoping that you can also mention a few tools that are either lower-cost truly low-cost or zero cost that while they may not have the accuracy or give the complete picture that some of the biomarkers and other tools that you mentioned do that, they can still provide reasonably reliable metrics that people can use in order to assess their level of recovery.
The CO2 tolerance test would be the first one, and you can just take that metric. Anytime you like the other ones, we've talked about so far, are things like your mood, we haven't mentioned libido but that's another assessment that people also tend to have a pretty good grip on and they know what feels normal. So when things go out of whack, it tends to be a pretty good signal that people will recognize.
Yeah, and one note about that. Something that came up in an episode on on hormones, both for male and female.
Email Health that at some point will Air, which is that there's no objective measure for people in terms of libido across-the-board. Meaning, people vary tremendously age, life circumstances, and on, and on. And so this is one of those subjective measures that I think people need to have some sense of what their quote unquote Baseline really is. And I'm guessing that the time
To assess that might best be when initiating or Midway through a relatively low intensity training phase, maybe during the time of year in which all the other factors that can influence libido are not at their maximum. So if you think about, you know, light and dopamine in the relationship between those and the testosterone estrogen systems, we know that libido testosterone estrogen, men and women tends to peak in the summer months.
So if that's your Baseline that you're comparing two, I don't know that. That's as reliable as being something like the the fall or the spring. And so, anyway, this again is very subjective, but we just encourage people to recognize that, there's no standard numbers for this no lookup table. And there's no equivalent of the libido BMI the LMI, no disrespect to the the acronym that probably is LMI. So I think that it's just something to keep in mind as people do.
Comparisons or subjective comparisons is. Don't pick a comparison to an extreme try and pick a comparison to a average as you know it to be.
That actually sort of reminding me. One issue that we have seen a lot lately is people if they're having libido issues or just even slightly noticing drop they just assume that then therefore means our testosterone was crashing and those things are certainly connected but that is not necessarily the case and where that becomes a problem is then people then go,
On things like trt Etc, with no true oversight, and then all kinds of other problems. So make sure that if you're going to take that step that you actually get to stops run, measured and you're working with a qualified person to guide you through that process. Don't just assume because you're having low energy or your libido is a little bit down. It could be simply training-related, it could be sleep-related could be any number of things. So that's like a little bit of a word of caution there,
two quick points. Along the lines of what you just said. One interesting thing that I learned when
Researching our episode on testosterone and estrogen optimization. This was an episode that we've done some time ago but is still available and are Cuban lab.com. All formats Etc is that many people actually increase their libido and even their levels of testosterone and estrogen as they progress from their 20s into their 40s. If they take excellent care of themselves including the correct exercise adaptations. Correct body fat to lean lean muscle ratios.
But of course, it can go the other way to a lot of people can be training to achieve such low body fat stores that libido can suffer. So it, you know, the age dependent age-related declines and libido are not necessarily written into the script of life. In fact, there are some data points from a really interesting paper. I talked about in that episode of individuals. This was a study focused on males in their 80s and 90s who maintained total and free testosterone as high as individuals in their 20s.
But then when you look at the lifestyle factors of those people in their 80s and 90s, they were doing a lot to create that that scenario. The second point is one related to what you just said which is very true. Which is people generally tend to assume that a drop in libido is related to a drop in testosterone and then assume that they need to increase their testosterone. And in some cases, that is true. Absolutely. But it's also often the case that people who take
Estrogen or Aroma taste blockers that is enzyme Inhibitors that prevent the conversion of testosterone to estrogen experience. Severe deficits in libido because of estrogen totally low. Total estrogen blockers are as much an issue here as low testosterone. Then the final point is also one that many people now. Men and women are, I think need to be aware of which is that dihydrotestosterone DHT is among the more powerful androgens for power out.
Output physical power output, but also for libido and DHT is strongly, inhibited by certain things like turmeric. So a lot of people who are taking a high doses of turmeric can experience drops and libido. So there and who are taking various compounds to prevent hair loss? Yep. Things like finasteride. Hold it. So there's a whole catalog of things that can reduce libido that are not directly in the testosterone. Pathway, it can be Rudy, is she related?
Estrogen blade and this, I think points to the importance of. Yes, take a subjective measure of your libido. Pay attention, essentially, be aware. Don't, you know? Don't obsess, but be aware and try and figure out what factors are involved for you but don't immediately assume that it what's needed is more testosterone and oftentimes the opposite is the
case. Yeah, yeah. Try to put on a lot of muscle with no estrogen
Good luck, right? And and indeed a lot of athletes in particular, you know, competitive bodybuilders that have that, you know, Saran Wrap thin skin. If you get to know some of those people you talk to them. They they can look like the sort of comic book archetype of what someone might might want to be. I mean that's not what this discussion or these episodes have been about but oftentimes they can have serious libido issues.
I mentioned earlier and I will emphasize it once more. You need to be very cautious when you're
Taking antioxidants, anti-inflammatories, cortisol reducers for all those reasons, right? I didn't really sort of get an examples, but you just nailed another. Fantastic reason of it. We do not give those things prophylactically. I strongly discourage people from just walking around, taking supplementation of antioxidants, especially powerful ones for no reason. If you have done some testing and you have a good reason to do, so I'm fine or if you're in a very specific take
Training phase or something like that. Cool. But if you just walking around doing that, you are often times, not always, but you're often times causing problems that. Then you then try to solve by taking more of those anti-inflammatories. I feel terrible low energy low libido, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. I'm to inflamed Etc. So yeah, antioxidants in the form of food are fantastic. Almost no issue. There is good evidence actually there.
So don't worry about man, I shouldn't eat High antioxidant rich foods, you're going to be fine. What we're talking about here is Pharmaceuticals and supplementation where you can take orders of magnitude higher dosages very quickly and you could in the presence of food. So that distinction is also very important antioxidant. Rich foods are generally fine and that's consumed in totally absurd. Concentrations supplementation's powder is screams drugs Etc is where you can get into problem. So yeah you want to be very careful of doing that unless you have a reason we
Don't do that unless we see a reason to do. So in someone's
markers, yeah. And herbal compounds. Despite the fact that they're herbal can be quite potent modulators of hormones. Ashwagandha being an example to herbal compounds that. We've talked a lot about on our podcast before and repeatedly including in that testosterone estrogen and optimization episode Tonga alley and for doji aggressiveness Tonga. All, he's now taken by
Large number of men and women Tom golly and for dodea typically men, I'm not sure that they're any good studies about the effects of Fado Gia. The in women, those are herbal compounds that can have potent effects in increasing testosterone and luteinizing hormone. Do they work? Yeah, they work to varying degrees in in most everybody. Not certainly not in everybody, but they do work, but they work because they're potent. They have effects. So the idea that herbal compounds are not powerful.
Is wrong and it's important to remember that that can cut both ways. Hence my mention of this observation related to turmeric which is not to say that. Some people can't take turmeric and feel perfectly fine, maintain or even increase their libido that. I sure that can happen. It's just that for people that are very DHT. Sensitive, this tends to be an issue. So, unfortunately for many of these compounds, the only way to find out is really to try them or to just completely avoid them and decide you don't want to try them as fine.
You but there really aren't ways to predict who will respond, who won't, and who will be hyper responders. And in that case, it's a bit of a, it's a little bit of a wild
west. I'm also sort of remembering what the point of this conversation was supposed to be and maybe I'll return back to that, which were some cost free or low cost metrics. That was the very fun tangent. But nonetheless, another couple of ones you can do our grip strength.
Testing. So if you can buy a fairly cheap handgrip dynamometer on any number of places, these are typically able to be purchased for twenty to forty dollars or something like that, right. You can actually just test that every day. I've done that in a number of athletes for a decent amount of time. Admittedly, I don't do it anymore and that's not because I disagree with it, but because we just were getting the information already and it was just too redundant but if that's the only option, it is a great one to do.
I mentioned Also earlier how I actually, like, speed tests over strength test as an earlier indication of overreaching. And so, because of that, I like a vertical jump test, if you have access to a force plate, that's great. And then you can get more in-depth characteristics of the force, velocity curve, and acceleration, and things like that used a lot in high performance situations. If not simply looking at, you know, your performance and so you can kind of go back to one of our earlier episodes when I described coloring
My fingertips with highlighters earlier in my life. You could do the same thing and go out in your garage and everyday, jump up and touch that marker and see where your app. So system like that could be done. You can also use tools, like force transducer and do a standard movement against a vertical jump or a high Pole or something like that and measure the velocity. And just compare that day today of a standard load, right? So you do it every single time with the same load. Same similar thing can be done with like a
Medicine ball throw. So you have the same ball. You throw the same thing and just sort of where you're at today. You want to do a little bit of warm up but not excessive here. You want to kind of get an idea of where your Baseline is and you don't want to influence it by the veracity of the warm up every single day because that alone can change its same thing with stretching acute, static stretching directly, influences, power production so you don't want to go out there and one day do a 20-minute stretch before, then they the other day, you can stretch it all because that alone will cause
Deviations in your performance. So try to keep everything you can think of standardized and that'll give you a little bit better data, a remembering all of these values. The biomarkers, the performance of they have normal variations, you just want to figure out first and foremost, what those normal variations are for you. So you have your normal number, you have your standard deviation. When you start getting outside of that standard deviation, you start paying attention. And so that's kind of like what we typically call that the gray Zone
So if it is in the gray Zone, we're fine, we're not adjusting. But if it's outside of that, whatever that is for you recognizing that the gray zone is smaller for some folks, and larger for others. But what is normal for you and your situation? And then you can make your decisions outside of that when you see numbers that are consistently or more than three to five days in a row or closed for the last five days for the last six, something like that. Then you may have some cause for Action.
Well, that was an incredible.
Description of the various tools and modes for recovery. And I realized I jumped the gun a bit during our discussion about food and supplements. But I like to think that serves as a nice precursor to the next episode, which is going to be all about nutrition and supplementation. If you're learning from and or enjoying this podcast, please subscribe to our YouTube channel. That's a terrific zero-cost way to support us. In addition, please subscribe to the podcast on Spotify and apple and on both Spotify and Apple.
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And as always, thank you for your interest in science.
